Estelle Blaschke, Photography and the Commodification of Images

Photography and the Commodification of Images: From the Bettmann Archive to Corbis (ca. 1924 – 2010) La photographie et l’industrialisation des images: Du Fonds Bettmann à Corbis (ca. 1924 – 2010)

Estelle Blaschke Thèse de doctorat d’histoire et civilisations, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 12 décembre 2011

Sous la direction de André Gunthert et Michel Poivert Jury: Matthias Bruhn, François Brunet, André Gunthert, Olivier Lugon, Michel Poivert

Remerciements J’exprime ici toute ma reconnaissance à André Gunthert pour avoir accepté la direction de cette recherche et l’avoir accompagnée avec tant d’enthousiasme et de soutien.

Ses conseils ont largement contribués à l’aboutissement de ce travail. Je tiens à remercier tout autant Michel Poivert d’avoir accepté la co-direction de cette recherche avec bienveillance et disponibilité.

Cette thèse a été partiellement financée par des bourses de doctorat accordés par le DAAD (Office allemand d’échanges universitaires), par l’EHESS et l’Institut MaxPlanck d’histoire des sciences, Allemagne. Je souhaite ainsi remercier Lorraine Daston pour son soutien inappréciable.

Je tiens à remercier très chaleureusement les membres étudiants du l’Lhivic/EHESS, anciens et actuels, en particulier Audrey Leblanc et Nora Mathys, et les membres de la section II de l’Institut Max-Planck pour leurs débats riches et animés, et la pertinence des remarques qui ont pleinement participé à la réalisation de ce travail. Je souhaite également remercier les responsables de collections qui m’ont ouvert leurs portes et fait profiter de leurs connaissances: Kenneth Johnston, Ann Hartmann, Sarah Scott Kubiak et Els Rjiper (Corbis); Sébastien Dupuy (Sygma); Nathalie Doury (La Parisienne de Photographie); et Ulrich Ramershoven (Ullstein Bild).

Merci à toutes et tous qui ont contribué par leur savoir, leur générosité au bon déroulement de ce travail, en particulier Matthias Bruhn, Kelly Wilder, Herta Wolf, Jeff Guess, Elizabeth Edwards et Mirjam Brusius.

Merci à Linda Eerme, Claire Bacher et Pamela Selywn pour leurs lectures attentives et informeés, sans lesquelles ce travail n’existerait pas dans sa forme actuelle.

Merci à Kito Nedo qui voit les choses souvent plus claires. Merci à mes amies, en particulier Sarah Lamparter, pour la mise en page de cette thèse.

Merci à ma famille, avec une pensée particulière à mon père, pour leur indéfectible soutien.

Table of Contents 5

Introduction

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Part I The Picture Market in Germany in the Weimar Republic (ca. 1924 – 1932) 17

Chapter 1 “the picture-hunger of modern man” 17 1. A Promising Business: Photographic Agencies and Commercial Picture Libraries 23 2. Print, Camera, Film: Technological Advances 28 3. Press and Adver­t ising: The Expansion of Markets 29 3.1 The Press and Illustrierte 33 3.2 Text, Illustration, Photograph: The Rise of Advertising Photography 41 4. Photography and Copyright 54 Conclusion

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Part II “Making history a slightly profitable thing” – The Bettmann Archive (ca. 1933 – 1981) 55

Chapter 1

From the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann to the Bettmann Archive 55 1. Otto Bettmann (1903-1998) 59 2. Bettmann and the Kunstbibliothek 62 3. Pictorial Research: the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin

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Chapter 2

Creating a Commodity, Creating a Service 68 1. Re-Production: 70 1.1 Reproduction Photography 78 1.2 ‘Value-less’ and ‘Value-free’ Images 82 1.3 Appropriation processes 93 Conclusion 95 2. Re-Cycling: 97 2.1 Subject Eyes: Evaluating the Iconographic Content 104 2.2 Developing Selection Criteria 108 2.3 “We need specialists:” the American Picture Market and the Bettmann Archive 127 Conclusion 128 3. Pictorial Products: 128 3.1 “Old Prints and Photographs in Modern Use” and Beyond 130 3.2 Selling Illustrations, Selling Inspiration 135 3.3 The Art of Advertising

148 4. Picture House: The Archive and Retrieval System 151 4.1 The Index Card: Searching, Storing, Displaying 167 4.2 Classification and Preservation 174 4.3 From the Library to the Office 178 4.4 Ideal vs.

Reality 181 4.5 “One word is worth a million pictures” and the Bettmann Portable Archive 188 Conclusion 190 Chapter 3

“Either you grow or you go” – Towards the Aggregation of the Market

196 Part III

Corbis, or the Excess of the Photographic Archive (1989–present) 198 Chapter 1

The Emergence and Development of Visual Content Providers 198 1. The Dream of Immateriality 206 2. Banking on Images: The Corbis Collection 212 3. Creating Digital Image Products 222 Chapter 2

The Revenge of Materiality 222 1. Iron Mountain: Preserving the Analogue Matter 229 2. Digital Materiality 234 3. Public Access, Private Library 237 4. Finding Pictures 244 5. The In/Discipline of the Archive and Conclusion

250 Conclusion 258 Bibliography 278 List of Illustrations

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Introduction On June 26 in 1843, William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photographic reproducibility, the first negative-positive technique known as calotype, signed an agreement with the French entrepreneur and ‘capitalist’ Eugène Maret, Marquis de Bassano.1 The document transferred the patent for the commercial exploitation of Talbot’s groundbreaking invention to Maret for the period of fifteen years in exchange for a quarter of the profits generated by the sale of calotype paper and the finished prints as well as the extensive promotion of “the merit of Mr. Talbot’s invention”2 in France; this would, as Talbot’s mother Lady Elisabeth Fielding marvelled, “produce more fame…, besides eventually more money.”3 For the Marquis de Bassano the acquisition of a photography patent was just one of his numerous investments, which were primarily focused on the thriving mining industry. However, Bassano sensed the enormous potential of the calotype process, a technique that Talbot assured him “was simpler, much simpler”4 than the daguerreotype, and was capable of producing “a hundred copies”5 of the original picture that could “be kept for an indefinite period of time.”6 Shortly thereafter, the Société Calotype was established in Paris to instruct ‘artists’ in the creation of calotypes, “of which the results are so perfect that they assure success.”7 It set up a workshop in which the production of copies was to be carried out by unskilled workers, women and children, since according to Talbot “making the copies is merely a mechanical affair.”8 Bassano anticipated big business, a production and licensing scheme on an industrial

1 See the article by Nancy Keeler, “Inventors and Entrepreneurs,” History of Photography 26, no. 1 (2002), 26-33. Keeler traces Talbot’s attempts to establish business agreements during the 1840s, first in France and then, more successfully, in Great Britain. The calotype workshop in Reading (later relocated to London) was directed by Nicolaas Henneman and predominantly supplied Talbot with prints for this book Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published work to be illustrated with photographs. Maret’s full given name was Hugues Antoine Joseph Eugène Maret, Marquis de Bassano.

2 Agreement between Hughes Antoine Eugène de Bassano and William Henry Fox Talbot from 1843. Accessible via the database “The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot,” http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk. Document number 4685. I thank André Gunthert for directing my attention to the Marquis de Bassano and the foundation of the Société Calotype.

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Letter from Elizabeth Theresa Fielding to Talbot, dated January 28, 1843. Document number 4710.

4

Letter from Talbot to Améline Petit de Billier, dated February 28, 1843. Document number 4742.

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Letter from Talbot to Améline Petit de Billier, dated February 7, 1843. Document number 4719.

6 Ibid.

7 Letter from Améline Petit de Billier to Talbot, dated February 21, 1843. Document number 3265.

8 See note 5. The studio rented by the Société Calotype was located in the very centre of Paris on Place du Carrousel opposite the Louvre museum.

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scale with “a veritable swarm of artist-photographers at any every corner of France,”9 creating a growing stock of negatives. The company, consisting of several associates, was to embrace capitalist methods, namely geographical expansion, the division of labour and efficient administrative structures. Although the venture failed and Bassano and his associates withdrew from the photography business by ceding the patent back to Talbot in 1845, the venture was the first attempt to commercially exploit photography as a means of making and copying pictures mechanically.10 Photography and its dual role of reproducing the existing world and producing quasi-identical copies from a negative, was applauded by some and condemned by others.

Charles Baudelaire, mocking commercial photography, was sorely alarmed about the medium’s imminent future and its power to undermine the established categories of art and culture. In Baudelaire’s view, photography should be limited to a state of servitude, to simply recording the past in order to “rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books, prints and manuscripts, which time is devouring, precious things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory....”11 At about the same time, in his 1859 article “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” the American physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes advocated for the creation of “enormous collections of forms [of reproduced images]…classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now.”12 Despite its various shortcomings, especially in the early decades, contemporaries marvelled at the prospect of this new technology, as it promised to considerably ease the accumulation, handling and exchange of images (be it as records, documents, illustrations or art).

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of photographic

9

Keeler, “Inventors and Entrepreneurs,” 27.

10 Maret’s idea of a large production scheme was doomed to fail, since the making and multiplication of images was still arduous and highly time-consuming. It was only by the end of the nineteenth century that photogravure techniques made the reproduction of photographs easier and less expensive.

11 Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, ed. and trans. by Jonathan Mayne (Londom: Phaidon, 1955), 125.

[Original: “Qu’elle sauve de l’oubli les ruines pendantes, les livres, les estampes et les manuscrits que le temps dévore, les choses précieuses dont la forme va disparaître et qui demandent une place dans les archives de notre mémoire, elle sera remerciée et applaudie.” in Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques: l’art romantique et autres œuvres critiques, Salon de 1859, textes établis par Henri Lemaître (Paris: Ed. L’Harmattan, 1997).] Unless indicated otherwise, the translations throughout the study were done by the author.

12 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859), reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 71-82, here: 81.

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collections and catalogues for a variety of purposes: for visual mapping and documentation, as undertaken by the Mission héliographique in France,13 the Photographic Survey Movement in Great Britain14 and similar enterprises in the United States15 and Germany;16 for scientific research and teaching, with particular disciplinary values for the fields of anthropology, archaeology, astronomy17 and art history;18 and for the improvement of police tracking systems and criminal identification.19 Some of these collections were small, depending on their objective; others such as Paul Otlet’s Répertoire iconographique universel or Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète were designed as world documenting projects. However, there was another use developed that has attracted relatively little scholarly interest so far, and which is the object of this study: the establishment and management of photographic collections for commercial purposes.

Object of Study and Hypotheses This study focuses on the development of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries and on the commodification of images via photography from the 1920s up to the present. Image banks, used as an umbrella term for photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries in the context of this work, are companies, which collect, produce and stock images as photographs, in order to make them available for all kinds of editorial and commercial uses. Thus, they must ensure the accessibility to images (for which they charge a fee), be it by means of a specific office location and trade catalogues, by mail and more recently by online delivery. The capital of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries is either accumulated through the purchase 13 Anne de Mondenard, “La mission héliographique: mythe et histoire,” Études Photographiques 2 (May 1997), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index127.html.

14 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885-1918 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), forthcoming.

15 Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

16 Herta Wolf, “Das Denkmälerarchiv Fotografie,” in Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters ed. Herta Wolf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 349–375.

17 See, among others, Jennifer Tucker, “The Historian, the Picture and the Archive,” Isis 97 (2006): 111-120.

Tucker refers to the Royal Astronomical Society in Great Britain, which she considers typical of many scientific organizations that started photographic collections and catalogues. Interestingly, Tucker notes that the Society also loaned and distributed its photographs commercially for use in world fairs, scientific exhibitions and teaching.

18 Angela Matyssek, Kunstgeschichte als fotografische Praxis. Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2009).

19 Here I am referring to Alphonse Bertillon’s use of photography for criminal identification and anthropometric studies.

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of collections or deposited by photographers in the form of reproducible negatives and prints, including the licensing rights for using these images. Image banks are places where images are kept safely; they are repositories. In contrast to archives, however, they are characterized by the circulation of their material, and in contrast to libraries by their commercial motive.

Why the concentration on this particular time frame? True, the second half of the nineteenth century experienced various earlier forms of “industrial madnesses,”20 revolving around the collection and reproduction of photographs. There were the publishers of high-quality photographic art and art reproductions, such as Blanquardt-Evrard in France and later Goupil & Cie,21 and the Florentine company Fratelli Alinari; other companies, including Underwood & Underwood and Keystone specialized in the management and the large-scale distribution of stereoscopic views; and then there were the countless postcard and illustration businesses, among others the French companies Lévy and Neurdien Frères. With the appearance of printed photographs in newspapers, journals and magazines towards the end of the nineteenth century, the first news picture agencies were established in the principal cities of the industrialized world, whose functioning defined modern, or twentieth-century, concepts of photographic agencies.

Although these earlier models show traces of the phenomenon that I will examine, the focus on the 1920s as a point of departure derives from a particular constellation of technological advances and the radical expansion of sales markets, namely the distribution of photographs to the media and advertising industry, satisfying the “picturehunger of modern man.”22 The development of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries is therefore closely related to the evolution of modern consumer society during the 1920s and 1930s. With mass production and spurred by heightened competition, image banks adapted more sophisticated and efficient methods of storage, administration and distribution. Indeed, the provision of the ‘infrastructure’ of an image is their primary concern. As a result, these companies asserted their status 20 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness. Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994).

21 Pierre-Lin Rénie, “De l’imprimerie photographique à la photographie imprimée,” Études Photographiques 20 (2007), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index925.html.

22 Jan Tschichold, New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, trans. by Ruari McLean (Berkely: University of California Press, 1995), 87. [Original: “der bildhunger des modernen menschen.”] in Jan Tschischold, “Fotografie und Typografie,” Die Form. Zeitschrift des deutschen Werkbundes 3 (1928): 140–150, here: 141.

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as catalysts and indispensable mechanism between the production and the distribution of photographs. Photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries increasingly banked on images, as an investment and for long-term use; they influenced and regulated the flow of images, ultimately shaping visual culture. Image banks were not a simple side effect, but became the vectors of the industrialization of the image via photography, and by extension of the proliferation of images and their vulgarization as industrial products. The principles of their functioning, which developed during the 1920s, are still valid today, regardless the changing technologies, markets and distribution systems.

However, rather than serving as mere intermediaries between the two parties, the photographer and the client, this study suggests that photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries must be considered quite literally as ‘agents,’ based both upon the meaning of the word agentum, “one who acts effectively, powerfully,” and also on the definition of agens, “a pleader, an advocate”23 (for photography). As an expansion of previous theories on the role of photographers, editors and the production of visual news,24 I will argue that photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries have assumed a vital role, albeit in different degrees, in moulding ‘raw’ material into a commercial product and in creating the exchange value of photographs.

Thus, I will examine one of the elements in the dispositif behind the way images come into our world.25 I will ask about how picture products, whether in analogue or digital form, are constructed, and how they are distributed and promoted. In what way do these commercial companies influence the creation of new methods of distribution, how do they create a desire for their products, and how do they shape and regulate the market? What are the criteria for selection, what are the criteria for storage? How are photographs organized and archived for their use and re-use? How do different photographic methods impact 23 Julia Cresswell, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

24 See, among others, Thierry Gervais, L’Illustration photographique. Naissance du spectacle de l’information, 1843-1914 (doctoral thesis, Department of History and Civilizations, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2007), http://www.lhivic.org/info/recherches/lillustration-photographique.

25 For the original definition of the sociological term dispositif introduced by Michel Foucault, see Michel Foucault, “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, 2nd vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). See also Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in Michel Foucault philosophe. Rencontre internationale. Paris, 9,10,11 janvier 1998 (Paris: Des Travaux, Seuil, 1989), 185-195.

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on the commercialization and the archiving? What concepts of photography are behind the collection of photographs for commercial purposes and what do the practices of image banks tell us about photography? What do they tell us about the image?

Since its beginnings, one of the vital aspects of the sales potential of photography lay in the substitution of an object by its image – replacing the “immobile and expensive”26 form of an object depicted in the photograph itself – and in the exploitation of the reproductive capabilities of photography. In contrast to the art market of photography, which is based on the concept of the photographic object and the original as represented by categories such as the fine print or (more recently) the vintage print, photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries trade on the image content and the licensing rights for reproducing and using the photograph in all possible ways.

However, I will claim, that besides the image content, there occurred a gradual shift towards the logistics and services required for the commodification of image products, contributing to the exchange value of photography.

The title of the study points to another thread of my argumentation: in the commercial context, photography functions as a medium that transforms all kinds of images, including (analogue) photographs, into standard-formatted commodities via mechanical reproduction. Extracted from their original material context, the images become mobile elements. This idea is absolutely crucial, since the enhanced mobility is the precondition for the commodification of images. Moreover, it adds to the technological fantasy of photography, namely the notion of immateriality. This, technological imaginary seems the inspiration for the accumulating ever-greater collections. In addition to this, I will argue that (again in the commercial context) the transformation from the analogue to the digital image market has been characterized by continuity rather than disruption. Yet, as the case studies will show, the tremendous difference in scale between analogue-era and digital-era collections re-emphasizes certain problematic issues in photography, such as the ambiguity between an original and its copy, between the construction of the “singularity, rarity, and authenticity” required for creating a product, and the nature of photography itself, marked by “multiplicity, ubiquity and equivalence.”27

26 Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 81.

27 Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (Autumn, 1982): 27-83, here: 28.

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The central theme of the analysis is the intrinsic relationship between photography, economy and the archive and the consequences thereof. This demands some explanation. Holmes’s essay is highly relevant to this study as it points to the convergence between photography, its reproducibility and its resulting sales potential. As a surrogate, or simulacrum to use Baudrillard’s term,28 the photograph, or stereograph, is compared to the virtual, but also solid nature of banknotes; its universal language makes it a universal currency.29 Understood as an industrial product, photography becomes part of an economic system determined by supply and demand, circulation, accounting and investment. In addition to this, Holmes links both these aspects – photography and its sales potential – to the creation of a classification system and the need to arrange these banknotes efficiently in order to render them accessible. A well-organized classification and storage system make the accumulation of ever more visual material possible and contribute to the formation of the exchange value for photographic reproductions.

In other words, the classification and archiving of photographs creates value. The case of image banks is particularly illuminating when thinking of photography as an object and medium of the archive because, first, in the commercial context, it is literally both the object and the medium. The photograph is stored for its use and re-use, it is the artefact itself, and at the same time, the photographic reproduction is the medium for the commercial distribution. Second, one is usually confronted with masses of images; the question of how to handle these images intelligently thus arises. Photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries are heavily dependent on archival functionality and efficiency in order to ensure their continued ability to use and disseminate images, as well as for administrative and accounting purposes; it is the very basis of their business.

However, the most problematic and hybrid aspect in the study is undoubtedly the use of the word ‘archive.’ I will argue that while the photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries do not correspond in all senses with the institutional idea of an archive and do not possess the authority associated with the term, the actual practices of these enterprises can be seen, to some degree, as archival practices. This is especially true for distributors of historical images and photographs, referred to here as 28 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981).

29 See Allan Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 91, no. 1. Photography and the Scholar/Critic (Spring, 1981): 15–25. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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commercial picture libraries, which represent only a small fraction of the picture market. One may claim that the business model of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries oscillates between the concept of the library and the archive, between a sales platform and a depot or repository. Images are licensed for a fee; they circulate; they are rented to the client for reproduction and returned thereafter. However, with the storage and preservation of the material these images also function as archival records: they are proof of the owner’s right to make and license copies, as well as the image provenance; they document material histories; they serve as a starting point to reconstruct the past – they reflect ‘things as they were,’ but require an interpretation to be legible und used.

Another rather vague aspect is the definition and delimitation of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries. For the purposes of this study (and in addition to the preliminary remarks) they are defined as companies that make their income from marketing photographs on behalf of the photographer or from marketing a purchased collection. This process includes the development and promotion of picture products, negotiations with clients, and the administration and storage of the material. However, as we will see, numerous overlaps exist: agents may act as producers, clients such as newspaper publishers sometimes establish their own distribution systems, and in some instances, public institutions such as museums and libraries commercialize their visual holdings. Whereas photographic agencies predominantly sell contemporary material, commercial picture libraries tend to concentrate on non-current imagery. The vagueness also results from the multitude of terms in use, including ‘illustration service,’ ‘wire service,’ and ‘visual content providers.’ These terms convey similar meanings, yet mirror varying approaches, markets and time periods. For example, the term ‘illustration service’ was the common reference during the nineteenth century, while ‘agency’ and ‘wire service’ are associated with the rising news and magazine culture of the 1920s and 1930s. The term ‘image bank’ actually appears only later in the 1970s with the rise of the so-called stock market. As is true for ‘the visual content provider’, a phrase that dates from the 1990s, the use of these terms is connected to technological changes such as electronic data processing and digital imaging and their implications.

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Case Studies and Methodology The choice of the Bettmann Archive, founded in Berlin during the late Weimar Republic and the American company Corbis, a child of the digital age and information technology as case studies was determined by conceptual and logistical considerations.

In 1995, the American company Corbis, owned by Microsoft founder William H. Gates, purchased the Bettmann Archive together with a number of other historical collections.

Specialized in the sale of digital and digitized images for print and website applications, Corbis engaged in large-scale editing and scanning projects to develop digital image products from its historical collections. This process, and especially the transfer of the analogue holdings to Iron Mountain, a high-security underground storage in rural Pennsylvania provoked much criticism from scholars, artists and the media related to the appropriation and control over collective memory. The virtually unanimous and certainly legitimate condemnation of Corbis’ policy, however, raised numerous additional questions, which were hardly addressed in the public debate: besides the highly complex definition of collective memory and photography, the history and functioning of image banks, including the Bettmann Archive remained vague. The Bettmann Archive, and by extension Corbis, are indeed extremely suited for the purpose of this study. Created by the German historian, librarian and entrepreneur Otto Bettmann around 1933, the Bettmann Archive was a picture research and distribution service for historical images and photographs. The Archive’s development and Bettmann’s academic background resulted in a highly level of sophistication and reflection in the search for efficient, resourceful methods of image classification and retrieval, including the creation of pre-electronic visual database. The link between the Bettmann Archive and Corbis illustrates the trajectory of commercial practices in the twentieth century with a clear focus on the mid-1920s and 1930s and the mid-1990s as transformative moments instigated by major technological changes and the development of new markets.

Beyond these conceptual criteria, the choice of these cases was influenced by the opportunity to access the analogue holdings at Iron Mountain, an opportunity that is rarely obtained in a private company (explaining the relative lack of research in this field). This also included the possibility of conducting interviews with professional edi-

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tors, archivists and managers at Corbis (and other companies)30 and the availability of information, such as trade catalogues, the Corbis website, bibliographical material and articles published in journals, magazines and newspapers. That said, it is the absence of empirical data, the blind spots in documentation and a lack of actual usage data for images in print and advertising as well as the unwillingness of most companies to provide information on sales figures, details on legal contracts, and other sensitive information, that are clearly the weaknesses of this study.

So, how does one do research on photographic collections consisting of several million items? The method I used to study the archival structures in both cases was first to immerse myself in the sheer abundance of the analogue and digital material, both in the archive and on the website. I then attempted to establish certain points of reference and criteria to reconstruct the details of rather heterogeneous, complex, and at times inconsistent systems of archival organizations, classifications, and practices. This approach would have been impossible without complete autonomy in studying negatives and prints, card catalogues, registers and un-catalogued Bettmann notebooks and memorabilia on the one hand, and on the other hand the knowledge of the Corbis archivists.

With the case studies selected, the analysis is geographically limited to Germany and the United States, although Corbis, like most modern companies, conducts business internationally. The patterns of development and the conclusions may, however, be measured against similar cases in other Western European countries, the USA, and other countries throughout the twentieth century, and could eventually inspire the re-evaluation of past and current institutional practices. In this sense, the study of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis is not intended as a comprehensive company history, nor as a history about people and their achievements, but may provide a lens for exploring the various methods of using and conceptualizing photography, and its paradoxes. Moreover, given that the study focuses on the functioning and the structure of economic markets, the photographs of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis will not be discussed from an aesthetic or qualitative point of view.

30  From Corbis, this includes Kenneth Johnston, director of historical collections; SĂŠbastien Dupuy, former director of the Corbis Sygma Initiative; Ann Hartmann, head of records management; Sarah Scott Kubiak, records manager; and Els Rijper, former director of conservation. Additional interviewees were Nathalie Doury, director of Parisienne de la Photographie; Dominique Lecourt, editor at Roger Viollet; and Ulrich Ramershoven, head of collections at Ullstein Bild, Germany.

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Scholars in visual and cultural studies, art history, and media and communication studies, who have treated commercial aspects of photography production and distribution usually point to the considerable lack of existing research and the general resistance towards the subject in their respective fields. This is certainly true, and it is only in recent times that the analysis of the picture market has begun to attract interdisciplinary attention. Works pieced together from these different fields form the theoretical foundation for the various aspects of this study and situates it in previous research and thinking. The relevant references are provided in the appropriate sections of this thesis.

Increased attention, in the field of visual culture studies, has been attributed to the structure and development of the stock photography market and the cultural implications of industrialized image production. These works have been fundamental in defining the questions raised by this study. However, in addition to these recent contributions, this study offers concrete and detailed examples in the form of a critical history of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis. It furthermore elaborates on archive and retrieval systems as a crucial factor for the commodification of images and the industrialization of production processes. Moreover, rather than focusing on the stock photography market since the 1970s and the creation of ‘generic’ images, I propose a distinctively photo-historical perspective on the subject, tracing certain patterns in the uses of photography.

What has been highly influential as a method of thinking throughout this study is the material turn in recent critical writing on photography, specifically the idea of perceiving and studying photographs not merely as two-dimensional surfaces, but also as “socially salient objects.”31 Taking into consideration the materiality of analogue and digital photography is indeed vital for understanding the functioning of the picture market and the performance of photography as a medium and an object of the archive. From the vast corpus of archival theory and its various facets and uses in different disciplines, I favoured the scholarship that deals with the specific natures of photo or visual archives, as well as recent postmodernist writings (especially in the field of Library and Information Studies) that investigate subjectivity in the creation of archival records and in archival interpretation. More generally, I have been inspired by

31 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), 15.

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visual culture studies that have investigated the image as a highly mediated amalgam of meanings and social, cultural, historical, and political constructions and practices.

Outline The work is structured into three main parts. Part I describes the development of the German picture market during the late Weimar Republic, shaped by technological advances, which led to an enhanced mobility and affordability of photography, the expansion of sales markets, and the controversial formation of photographic copyrights.

Part II uses the case of the Bettmann Archive first to establish the basic functioning principles of the picture market and second to develop several satellite topics that are relevant to the Bettmann Archive. The latter serves at situating the practice of photographic agencies and commercial picture within a wider context of cultural production and includes topics as diverse as the methods and genres of reproduction photography, and the use of photographic copyright, advertising photography, modernist concepts of typography or card catalogues in photographic collections. Part III traces the brief history of Corbis from the early 1990s to the present day, taking up various ideas developed throughout the study, such as the concepts of immateriality and materiality, and the formation of products and markets, exploring the similarities and differences of analogue and digital products and markets and the consequences of the digital transition.

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Part I The Picture Market in Germany in the Weimar Republic (ca. 1924–1932) Chapter 1 “Picture-Hunger of Modern Man” 1. A Promising Business: Photographic Agencies and Commercial Picture Libraries

This boom spawned wholly novel enterprises. Journalists, or writers who fancied themselves journalists, bankrupt businessmen without capital, grand or petty adventurers, all of them opened photo agencies. Their business was not current events – since they could not compete with the old, established firms in that area – but reportage and photo series of all kinds.

They provided the ‘ideas’ and looked for photographers to carry them out.

And then they sold the finished product, or didn’t. In the end they settled up with the photographer, honestly, dishonestly, or not at all.1 As noted in the Introduction, photo agencies and commercial picture libraries existed long before the boom that the Hungarian photographer János Reismann 2 describes in his memoirs Nyugtalan évek (The Restless Years). Developments in camera and printing technology, too, did not appear suddenly, but were the results of a continuous process spanning several decades. During the late Weimar Republic, the period to which Reismann refers, however, a number of factors coalesced that unleashed a moment of emergence, causing, once again, an upturn in photography as a visual medium, a 1 János Reismann, Nyugtalan évek, trans. into German by Marian Reismann and Geza Jaszai (Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1982), cited after Herbert Molderings, “Eine Schule der modernen Fotoreportage. Die Fotoagentur Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst) 1928 bis 1933,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 28, no. 107 (2008): 10. [Original: “Diese Konjunktur hat ganz neuartige Unternehmen ins Leben gerufen. Journalisten oder Schriftsteller, die sich für journalistisch begabt hielten, verkrachte Geschäftsleute ohne Kapital, großspurige und kleinkarierte Abenteurer, sie alle gründeten Fotoagenturen. Ihr Geschäft war nicht die Aktualitäten – den da konnten sie nicht mit den großen alteingesessenen Firmen konkurrieren – sondern Reportagen und Fotoserien aller Art. Sie lieferten die „Ideen“ und suchten dazu die Fotografen, die sie ausführten. Und sie brachten das fertige Produkt dann unter, oder auch nicht. Zum Schluss wurde mit den Fotografen abgerechnet, ehrlich, unehrlich oder gar nicht.”]. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations throughout the study were done by the author.

2 Born in Hungary in 1907, János Reismann moved from Paris to Berlin in 1927 where he completed a course at the Staatliche Fachschule für Phototechnik (Technical college for photography). From 1929 to 1931, he worked for the illustrated weekly magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) alongside John Heartfield and Erwin Piscator. In 1931, Reismann moved to Moscow where he was a correspondent for AIZ. He died in 1976. See database of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, http://fotomuzeum.hu/fotografiak.

18

social and cultural practice and above all, a business. As both catalyst and result, this phenomenon was accompanied by an acceleration of the commodification of photography and its conceptualization as an industrial product. The workings and organizational structures of the photographic agencies and commercial photo libraries that took shape during this time played an increasingly important role in photography’s process of becoming a commodity of modern consumer society. Consequently, this chapter explores the various factors that constituted this moment of emergence.

What Reismann describes, and what recent scholarship has termed an “age of picture agencies”3 or an “agency culture”4 is the unprecedented number and variety of commercial picture suppliers during the late Weimar Republic, most of them based in Berlin. At the centre of this development was photography’s promise as a potential source of income: the business of photography was, at least at first sight, uncomplicated, modern, and lucrative – so lucrative that amateur photographers, “grand and petty adventurers”5 with no knowledge of the industry, and impecunious businessmen, but also university graduates and investors, decided to try their hand at selling photographs and photographic reproductions. These enterprises ranged from one-man firms, which were often no more than the registered business of a freelance photographer, to the representatives of several photographers and small agencies specializing in certain subjects, from large publishing houses that established and exploited their own photographic archives to the branch offices of foreign, especially American, firms. Berlin agencies such as Zander & Labisch, Senneken, Atlantic or the Photothek Römer & Bernstein, which had set up in business before the First World War, grew into middle-sized enterprises. The labour became increasingly divided between photographers, operators, commercial managers, copywriters, messenger boys and archive and laboratory

3 Diethard Kerbs, “Die Epoche der Bildagenturen,” in Die Gleichschaltung der Bilder. Zur Geschichte der Pressefotografie 1930–1936, ed. Diethard Kerbs, Walter Uka, and Brigitte Walz-Richter (Berlin: Froelich & Kaufmann, 1983), 32. According to Kerbs, the “age of photo agencies” refers to the years between 1900 to 1933.

4 Matthias Bruhn, “Tarife für das Sichtbare. Eine kurze Geschichte der Fotoagenturen,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 27, no. 105 (2007): 19.

5

See note 1, Part I.

19

staff.6 As one of three large publishing companies, Hugenberg-Scherl maintained their own agency or form of distribution, the Scherl-Verlag’s central illustration department, which supplied pictorial material for in-house publications or re-distributed it for other purposes. Especially in the field of press photography, business was no longer limited to local or national markets, but extended across borders. The Berlin agencies cooperated with one another, in some cases, or worked with foreign partners to distribute each others’ products.7 The American Keystone Press Agency opened an office in Berlin in 1924 and later one in Paris as well. Branches of the agencies Underwood & Underwood, Associated Press Newsphotos, International News Photo or Wide World Photo Syndicate followed. The number of highly diverse picture suppliers rose rapidly; some were short-lived, others succeeded in establishing themselves or expanding their business.

While there were approximately thirty photographic agencies in Berlin in 1919,8 by the mid-1920s, “it had become difficult to gain an overview of the suppliers of illustration photography in the USA, Berlin, London and Paris.”9 Because photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries functioned as a hinge between supply and demand, between the production and the exploitation of visual material, the appearance of new enterprises and the expansion of the picture market would have been impossible without the radical expansion of sales markets in the 1920s. The markets for photographs as a commodity, especially after the First World War, were the press and publishing sector and an area utterly neglected thus far by historians: advertising. The absense of substantial research on advertising photography, especially in the European context, is rather surprising as the phenomenon

6 Kerbs, “Die Epoche der Bildagenturen,” 37–38. As Kerbs specifies, a “middle-sized news picture agency, such as Photothek Römer & Bernstein in Belle-Alliance Street 82 employed a photographer in chief, a business director, who would sometimes also work as editor or copywriter, in addition 2 or 3 operators, that is to say staff photographers, secretaries, archival and laboratory assistants and messenger boys…. The whole staff totalled to 7 to 12 employees. In its most busy times, a large company such as Atlantic provided work for thirteen operators alone.” [Original: “Eine Pressebildagentur mittlerer Größe wie z.B. die Photothek Römer & Bernstein in der Belle-Alliance-Str. 82 hatte damals einen Cheffotografen und einen kaufmännischen Leiter, der oft auch als Schriftsteller und Texter arbeitete, dazu 2 bis 3 Operateure, also angestellte Fotografen, sowie Sekretärinnen, Archiv- und Laborangestellte und Botenjungen…. Die ganze Belegschaft bestand aus 7 bis 12 Personen.

Eine große Firma, wie z.B. Atlantic hatte in ihrer besten Zeit allein 13 Operateure.”]

7 Ibid., 38.

8 Ibid., 36.

9

Bruhn, “Tarife für das Sichtbare,” 18.

20

was widely discussed among contemporaries.10 The picture trade did not only concentrate on photographs intended to illustrate current events in the press, or the photo reportages Reismann evokes in his memoirs. Instead, it encompassed every conceivable content and form. Chapter 3 will address this expansion of markets, especially the proliferation of illustrated periodicals and the use of photographs in advertising. New pictorial products emerged in response to the extraordinary diversity of the media, the multiplication of publication channels and the fierce competition among picture suppliers in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, the agencies increasingly specialized in certain products and markets. This diversification was accompanied by a professionalization of the way companies operated, developing more sophisticated ways of managing and exploiting images. The dynamization of the picture market and the maturing of the press and publishing business as well as advertising were largely the result of technological developments that came to fruition in the period under study. Chapter 2 is devoted to improvements in printing and camera technology as well as the quality of negatives, which facilitated image taking and enhanced the mobility of photographers.

In the quotation cited above, Reismann addresses, albeit indirectly, another factor that will be treated in chapter 4, and that represents a key element in the overall study: photography and intellectual property rights (in German law Urheberrecht).11 “In the end they settled up with the photographer, honestly, dishonestly, or not at all”12– the discrepancy between copyright law on the one hand and the actual handling of image copyright on the other acted as a veritable catalyst for the development of the picture market. As we shall see, this discrepancy favoured the emergence of new enterprises and strengthened the status and relative power of commercial picture suppliers in the first third of the twentieth century.

If the diversification and professionalization of the picture market during the Wei10 While advertising is generally acknowledged as a crucial sales market for photography, hardly any research has been carried out on the history of advertising photography so far. Exceptions are Robert Sobieszek, The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988); Françoise Denoyelle, La lumière de Paris. Le marché de la photographie 1919–1939, vol. 1 (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997); Helen Wilkenson, “The New Heraldry: Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in the 1930s Britain,” Journal of Design History 10, no.1 (1997): 28–38; Rolf Sachsse, “Die Fotografie in der Werbung,” in Strategien der Werbekunst 1850-1933, ed. Jörg Meißner (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, Bönen Kettler, 2004), 78–87.

11 Although there are some differences between the German legal concept of Urheberrecht and the English term copyright, for the sake of simplicity, I will speak here of copyright.

12

See note 1, Part I.

21

mar Republic may be read as a history of cultural and economic development, it needs to be stressed nonetheless that the new markets, and consequently the economic situation of the agencies, were extremely sensitive to economic cycles. The dynamism of the picture market, the establishment of countless new forms of publication and agencies on the one hand and the closure or failure of numerous enterprises on the other were not least an expression of the economic crises and political instability of the Weimar era. In economic history, the immensly complex interwar period is characterized as an era of extreme upswings and downturns, which clearly deviated from known cyclical patterns.13 Historians generally divide economic development during the Weimar Republic into three phases: the immediate post-war period from 1919 to 1923 as a phase of inflation, the phase of currency reform and relative stabilization from 1924 to 1928, and the world economic crisis or depression from 1929 to 1932, which hit the USA and Germany hardest.14 The structural transformation of the economy as a result of industrialization, with its shift from agriculture to manufacturing as the strongest valuecreating sector, was dealt a severe blow by the First World War, and above all by the world economic crisis. The tertiary or service sector, in contrast, increasingly gained in significance and held out hopes of employment at a time when industrial enterprises were laying off workers on a mass scale. Essentially, however, the extreme unemployment rate during the Weimar Republic was considered to be one of the main problems with serious social and political consequences. While the unemployment rate in 1928 was still 7.0 percent, it had more than doubled by 1930 and by 1932 had risen to 30.8 percent – nearly every third man was registered as jobless, with no statistical records on unemployment among women and youth.15 Particularly in Berlin and other German industrial cities, unemployment increased disproportionately. Thus the fact that increasing numbers of amateurs were trying to make a living from photography and firms from outside the industry decided to enter the picture market testifies not least to the very fragile employment situation in Germany, a situation that the last government of the Weimar Republic unsuccessfully sought to alleviate with the Emergency Law of

13 Heike Knortz, Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Weimarer Republik. Eine Einführung in Ökonomie und Gesellschaft der ersten deutschen Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2010), 14–15. See also, Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, 6th ed. (München: Oldenburg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2002).

14 Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 1998). The authors argue that Germany and the United States were the countries most affected by the world economic crisis of 1929, and by consequence experienced the greatest political and social changes.

15

Knortz, Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Weimarer Republik, 219.

22

September 4, 1932, which aimed to create jobs by promoting private entrepreneurial initiatives. The world economic crisis of 1929 and the 1930 electoral success of the National Socialists also led to a standstill in or withdrawal of foreign capital. This made it more difficult to overcome the crisis in the German economy, which was highly dependent upon these loans. These cyclical fluctuations during the Weimar Republic are reflected particularly in the chapter on the developments of sales markets. Given that sales markets, and consequently the picture market, developed mainly after the period of postwar recovery, the so-called stabilization, this chapter concentrates on the years between 1924 and 1932.

23

2. Print, Camera, Film: Technological Advances The technical innovations that contributed to the moment of emergence and boosted photographic production during the 1920s and 1930s concerned not just developments in camera techniques, but also printing techniques and the quality of negatives. Generally speaking, the production and printing of photographs became less expensive, which favoured the trend to regard photography as a potentially lucrative business.

As emphasized by scholarship, the proliferation of printed photographs was the result of a continuous process in improving camera and printing techniques that had started in the late nineteenth century.16 A crucial invention was halftone printing as a photomechanical printing process, patented in 1882,17 which gradually replaced the manual woodcut and wood engraving as well as lithography, and mechanized the publication of photographs in books and the printing press. The halftone process instigated the transition from “illustrations after photography” to “photographic illustration” and from the pictorial magazines of the nineteenth century to the “illustrated magazines” or Illustrierte that took on shape during the 1920s.18 The combination of halftone as a printing technique and the rotary press, the high-speed rotary press machine in particular, introduced in Germany in 1901,19 further accelerated the distribution of photography in the print media and bolstered mass circulation and the multiplication of distribution channels.

Colour printing, too, and accordingly colour photography, were significant innovations with regard to printing and photography, a development driven mainly by the 16 For the pre- and early history on photographic illustrations and the development of printed photography see Charles Grivel, André Gunthert and Bernd Stiegler, eds., Die Eroberung der Bilder. Photographie in Buch und Presse 1816–1914 (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003); Thierry Gervais, L’Illustration photographique. Naissance du spectacle de l’information, 1843–1914 (doctoral thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2007), http://www.lhivic.org/info/recherches/lillustration–photographique; Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie III. Das Geschäft mit dem aktuellen Foto: Fotografen, Bildagenturen, Interessenverbände, Arbeitstechnik. Eine Entwicklung in Deutschland bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 37 (1990): 13–37; Ivo Kranzfelder, “Idylle – Aufbruch – Propaganda. Fotografie in Deutschland 1900–1938,” Fotogeschichte Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 113 (2009): 5–20.

17 Here, the year of the invention of the halftone printing process refers to Georg Meisenbauer’s patent of May 9, 1882. Parallel to this, similar commercially successful methods were developed and patented in Great Britain and the United States.

18 As Thierry Gervais has shown, starting as early as 1843, photography played an increasingly important role in the illustration of newspapers and periodicals and for the creation of ‘visual news.’

19 The mounting of halftone plates on a rotary press first succeeded in Germany in 1901 with the printing of the daily newspaper Der Tag, published in Berlin by Hugenberg-Scherl.

24

advertising industry. However, due to the high costs, in 1920s’ and 1930s’ magazines colour printing was almost exclusively reserved for full-page advertisements and cover pages and, thus, less relevant for the vast majority of photographic illustrations.20 The introduction of faster and lighter cameras, such as the Ermanox launched in 1925, a handy medium-format camera equipped with an extremely light-sensitive Ernostar lens and numerous small-format apparatuses developed by almost every German and international manufacturer, led to greater mobility and flexibility, which, it is generally agreed, also stimulated the aesthetic development of photography. Widely discussed and advertised in contemporary periodicals, the strong emergence of small-format cameras was driven by “an easier and more convenient exposure in every situation.”21 Photographers, according to Karl Weiss’ assessment of the technological developments of 1932, were no longer obliged “to choose the most suitable angle among many possible ones, but able to produce a great number of exposures from various perspectives.”22 Thus, Weiss relates quantity to mobility. Furthermore, the integration of more lightsensitive lenses enabled photographers to shoot with hand-held cameras in interiors without requiring artificial light sources. While this led to “a less careful study of the individual subject,” as Weiss pointed out, the enhanced mobility generated “in many

20 Several scholars have pointed to the relationship between the development of colour printing and colour photography and the rise of the advertising industry during the late 1920s and 1930s. Richard Benson, for example, argues that, “we should not be naive about the reason for the development of color printing; it was entirely due to the belief that you had a better chance to sell someone something they didn’t need if you advertised it in color rather than in drab old black and white,” in Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 228. In his study on the history of American advertising, Roland Marchand provides further details: “As magazine advertising had mushroomed in the early 1920s, the percentage of ads in color had advanced hesitantly to levels between 12 and 38 percent. As late as 1924, however, an issue of Saturday Evening Post might include color in less than one-fourth of all full-page ads. Only 20 pages in a 160page magazine would contain any color but white, grey or black. Against the greyish blandness of such a background, a colored product could immediately and ingeniously provide an eye-catching advertising advantage,” in Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 121. More explicitly referring to colour photography in advertising, Robert Sobieszek suggests that, although the “graphic-arts industry had proved itself capable of printing three- and four color images since the turn of the century,” the “sudden success of color advertising photography” in the mid-1930s was due to the sharp growth of the industry during that time. See Sobieszek, Art of Persuasion, 68.

21 Karl Weiss ed., Deutscher Kamera-Almanach. Ein Jahrbuch für die Photographie unserer Zeit, vol. 23 (Berlin: Union, 1933), 7. The Deutscher Kamera Almanach (German camera yearbook) was one of the most important and comprehensive annual reviews addressed to amateur and professional photographers. Published from 1905 to 1941, it reported on the latest technical developments, photographic trends and provided a directory on photographic associations and professional addresses.

22 Ibid., 7. [Original: “Man hatte es nicht mehr nötig den geeignetsten Aufnahmestandpunkt unter anderen zu wählen, sondern stellte eine größere Zahl von Aufnahmen von verschiedenen Standpunkten aus her.”]

25

cases a greater and more effective freshness in the conceptualization of the image.”23 Through a “more flexible sight,” a “faster readiness,” more affordable camera equipment and film material, small-format cameras were especially appealing to amateur photographers and artists. In line with fellow critics, Weiss summarized: “Photography has somehow created its own aesthetics.”24 For press photography or commercial photography more generally, however, the use of small-format cameras was (at first) rather marginal. Despite the “remarkable results” and “unmatched sharpness”25 of the photographs as well as the camera’s handiness, with which the manufacturing company Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar in 1930 promoted its most famous product, the Leica camera,26 persistent differences in picture quality meant that professional photographers continued to prefer medium-format cameras.

Medium-format and large-format cameras had the additional advantage of producing negatives that did not require enlargement in order to create a photographic print.

Small-format cameras were used only very occasionally by established photographers, also because they were considered unprofessional by many editors-in-chief and associated with amateur photography. The archives of photojournalistic agencies, such as the historical stock of the American agencies United Press International, ACME, International News Photos, the German Ullstein Bilderdienst and the French agency RogerViollet bear witness to this: up until the end of the 1940s and beyond, the standard negative format was medium size. There is no doubt, though, that a new generation of lightweight, hand-held cameras with improved mechanical and optical features allowed for greater mobility and flexibility.

Besides the question of the format, progress in the field of film material also played a role in the accumulation and storage of photographs, thus influencing the creation of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries. Changes in film material ap-

23 Ibid., 7–8. [Original: “Mit der Verringerung des Studiums am einzelnen Motiv wurde in vielen Fällen eine größere und wirksamere Frische in der Bildauffassung erreicht.”]

24

Ibid., 8. [Original: “Die Photographie hat sich gewissermaßen eine eigene Ästhetik geschaffen.”]

25

Ibid.

26 As a fixed section, the yearbook Deutscher Kamera-Almanach also contained advertisements by the photographic industry, entitled Mitteilungen und Anzeigen der photographischen Industrie (Annoncements and advertisements by the photographic industry). The advertisements by companies such as Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar promoting its Leica camera and Zeiss-Ikon highlight in particular the enhanced mobility achieved by a new generation of small-format cameras. According to these ads, given the excellent picture quality and the moderate prices, these cameras satisfied the needs of both amateurs and professionals.

26

plied in two areas: advances in the flexible celluloid base and the refinement of chemical emulsions. First produced commercially in 1887, cellulose nitrate film was the first flexible and transparent photographic support, used both for cinematography and still photography. Suitable for film packs and roll films, cellulose film gradually replaced the breakable and heavy glass plate, notwithstanding the fact that the stability of the image on film was inferior to the glass plate support. In terms of its storage, celluloid also took up less space than glass plates. The considerable disadvantage of cellulose nitrate was its flammability and its tendency to decompose chemically over time, a handicap that was widely acknowledged at the time.

27

During the late 1920s improve-

ments in plastic technology, however, allowed for the use of acetate as a safer film support, enabling photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries to collect large quantities of visual material and to store the negatives more easily.

In additon to this, photographic production was spurred by the extensive distribution of roll film, in addition to film packs, cut-sheet film or glass plates. The practicability of the spool-wound photographic film compared to other individual support material relied on the lower weight, volume and price of roll film compared to other products, whereby it was possible “to carry roll films of 36 exposures comfortably in a normal coat pocket,” and, at the same time, “have enough space for all sorts of other things.”28 First included in the Eastman Kodak box camera of 1888,29 the roll film was now used in a variety of new camera models, such as the growing range of Kodak cameras, the Voigtländer Bessa series, the Mentor Three-Four camera for 16 pictures and the KolibriKamera manufactured by Zeiss Ikon, and many more, including the Hawkette, Icarette, Cocarette, Ysella, Rollette, Piccolette, Bobette, etc.30 Finally, the refinement of chemical emulsions was another element in the development of photography, and one that, together with the emergence of small-format cam27 In addition to the flammability of nitrate film, the chemical instability of cellulose acetate film has been causing major problems with the storage and the preservation of historical photographic collections, an aspect that will be treated in Part III. 28 Otto Mente, “Über einige Erfahrungen beim Photographieren mit Filmen,” in Deutscher Kamera, vol. 18 (1928), 147–157, here: 148. [Original: ... wodurch man “Rollfilme für 36 Aufnahmen nicht nur bequem in einer normalen Rocktasche” unterbringen konnte, sondern “daneben noch Platz für allerlei andere Dinge” hatte.]

29 Patented in the United States by Hannibal Goodwin in 1887, the combination of a transparent flexible celluloid film with roller cameras was further developed and manufactured by George Eastman and his collaborator Henry Reichenbach. Eastman was convinced of the commercial potential of the rollfilm and promulgated it by using it in a wide range of Kodak cameras.

30

Hans D. Abring, Von Daguerre bis heute (Herne: Privates Fotomuseum, 1985).

27

eras, was widely discussed in contemporary photography periodicals and trade journals.31 The industry provided “film material of exceptionally high general and colour sensitivity,”32 which augmented the quality of negative enlargements and prints. While the glass plate was long considered a better and more reliable image carrier than celluloid, the flexible plastic support ultimately achieved a similar quality standard, leading to the replacement of the glass plate as the dominant negative support.

Lightweight cameras, stronger lenses, high-sensitive films and better printing techniques were the technological sine qua non for the increase in the production and reproduction of photographs as well as the enhanced mobility of photographers and the flexibility of the medium.

31 The Deutsche Kamera-Almanach, for example, published several articles on the matter, such as “Vom Kleinbild-Negativ zur Großkopie?” [no author credited] in Deutscher Kamera-Almanach, vol. 22 (1932), 32–40; Kurt Jacobsohn, “Fortschritte in der Herstellung und Verarbeitung höchstempfindlichen und höchstfarbenempfindlichen Aufnahmematerials” in Deutscher Kamera-Almanach, vol. 20 (1930), 129–140; Heinz Naumann, “Kleinbildaufnahmen und Vergrößerungen: hohe Tiefenschärfe, Notwendigkeit des qualitativ hochwertigen Films (Feinkornemulsionen) für die Vergrößerung,” in Deutscher Kamera-Almanach, vol. 21 (1931), 87–105.

32 Kurt Jacobsohn, “Fortschritte in der Herstellung und Verarbeitung,” 138. [Original: “Dank der Fortschritte, die in den letzten Jahren auf dem Gebiet der Fabrikation von Platten und Filmen gemacht worden sind, steht dem Lichtbildner ein Aufnahmematerial von außerordentlich hoher Allgemein- und Farbenempfindlichkeit zur Verfügung.”]

28

3. Press and Advertising: The Expansion of Markets Art and media historians have studied the development of photography in the 1920s and 1930s mainly in relation to press photography and the formation of new aesthetic modes of representation, the emancipation of photography from painting, referred to under the term New Vision (Neues Sehen), a term coined by László Moholy-Nagy.33 Alongside press photography and photography and avant-garde art, however, a neglected history of the ‘other’ or ‘miscellaneous’ photography emerges:the use of photography in advertising and for the illustration of non-current editorial content of all kinds, which for many photographers constituted significant, if not the most important sources of income. In contrast to press photography and art photography, the latter could be subsumed under the term Gebrauchsfotografie.34 This term refers to the utilitarian use of photographs in the tradition of illustration, in which the photograph serves as raw material for further processing or inclusion in works of design. The trade in photographs and photographic reproductions accordingly concentrated not only on press photography, but also with increasing frequency on the production and supply of utilitarian photographs and photographically reproduced images, especially advertising. The development of the press and publishing industry and the use of photography in advertising, which will be sketched in the following remarks, functioned as a long-desired outlet for photographic production and reproduction, for it was only with the mass-circulation print media and advertising that the reproducibility of photographs reached its full potential. The multiplication of channels of publication and the plurality of visual or reproductive media such as photography, film, and radio, led to the oft-cited ubiquity (and vulgarization) of the visual image and cultural experience that contemporaries such as Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer and many others commented upon.

33 László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film. Bauhausbücher vol. 8 (München: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925). For recent studies on Neues Sehen and the history of photography in Germany see Olivier Lugon, La Photographie en Allemagne. Anthologie de textes, 1919–1939 (Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1997); Christine Kühn, “Kunstbibliothek und Neues Sehen. Die Wahrnehmung moderner Fotografie im Berlin der Weimarer Republik,” in Neues Sehen in Berlin. Fotografie der Zwanziger Jahre, ed. Bernd Evers (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2005); Ivo Kranzfelder, “Idylle – Aufbruch – Propaganda,” 2009.

34 I furthermore understand Gebrauchsfotografie in the sense Jeremy Aynsley has described the notion of Gebrauch. Aynsley rightly points out, that the prefix Gebrauch was used in various cultural arenas of Weimar Germany, such as poetry and music, among others Hanns Eisler’s Gebrauchsmusik (Utilitarian music). It signified a functionalist, non-elitist, usually Marxist approach, introducing everyday subject matter into art, ultimately aiming at flattening the distinction between high art and popular and commercial art. Hence, Gebrauchsfotografie is inevitably linked to the context it appears in, that is the popular mass media. See Jeremy Aynsley, “Gebrauchsgraphik as an Early Graphic Design Journal, 1924–1938,” Journal of Design History 5, no. 1 (1992): 53–72.

29

3.1 The Press and Illustrierte The decisive impetus for the development of the picture market and the presence of photography was the strong expansion of the press and publishing industry after the First World War, especially after the currency reform and relative stabilization of German business from 1924 onwards. The 1920s saw the founding of numerous new illustrated papers and the maturing of the Illustrierte as a journalistic genre and economic model. 35 It is impossible to draw a clear distinction between an “illustrated paper” and the Illustrierte, since from the perspective of media studies, the Illustrierte lies somewhere “in-between the conceptual pair of the newspaper and the periodical.”36 Wilhelm Marckwardt describes the Illustrierte as a mass-distribution periodical publication of “general content and secondary topicality.”37 In comparison to the professional journal, the Illustrierte was characterized first by its orientation towards a mass audience and its broad range of themes, second by its weekly or monthly publication, and third by its focus on pictures, either drawn illustrations or photographs, to accompany contributions, whether reports on current events, series of articles, or serialized novels. In their design, thematic orientation, visual presence, and the hasty manner of their consumption, the Illustrierte, according to Kracauer, had less in common with the newspaper business than with the cinema newsreel.38 In the mid-1920s, nearly every larger city had its own illustrated weekly paper with national distribution, such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), the Münchner Illustrierte Zeitung or the Vossische Zeitung. Countless picture-dominated periodicals of the most varied types thronged the market, including Die grüne Post, Uhu, Die Koralle, Scherl’s Magazin, Die Wochenschau and Die Dame.39 Numerous illustrated papers and magazines associated with political parties were also created as a mirror and mouthpiece of contemporary politics, the most prominent and widely distributed of which was the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ). According to the catalogue of newspapers 35 As scholars have argued, the foundations of this phenomenon were largely laid during the nineteenth century. See, among others, Thierry Gervais, “L’invention du magazine. La photographie mise en page dans ‘La Vie au grand air,’” Études Photographiques, 20 (June 2007) 50–67.

36 Wilhelm Marckwardt, Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit. Publizistische Funktion, ökonomische Entwicklung und inhaltliche Tendenzen (München: Minerva-Publikationen, 1982).

37 Ibid., 4.

38 Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Photographie,” [1927] in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 37. [Original: “Ihrem Verfahren entspricht das der Film-Wochenschau.”]

39

Molderings, “Eine Schule der modernen Fotoreportage,” 7.

30

published by the Mosse publishing house, “47 daily newspapers, 33 neighbourhood newspapers (Stadtteilzeitungen), as well as 50 weekly papers, including nine illustrated papers and five illustrated weekly supplements to the major daily papers,” appeared in Berlin in 1931.40 Berlin and Leipzig were the centres of illustrated press publication and Berlin, with the three largest publishing houses – Hugenberg-Scherl, Ullstein, and Mosse – as well as Münzenberg and many smaller publishers, was the media capital of Germany.41 In comparison to similar developments in cities like London, Paris, and New York, however, Berlin’s special status as a “newspaper town”42 was rooted not just in the size of print runs, but also and more particularly in the wide variety of contents, and the overwhelming number and distribution of newspapers, periodicals and Illustrierte. As Peter de Mendelsohn put it, “nowhere were there so many newspapers, and nowhere were they so diverse.”43 Consequently, the literature repeatedly refers to the unprecedented presence and variety of pictorial media, which became a fixture in the everyday lives of broad segments of the population.44 The unprecedented variety and number of publications led quite directly to an unprecedented demand for utilitarian and current-events photographs and an increased and ever broader range of images, since, as Kracauer noted, The daily papers are illustrating their texts more and more. And what would a magazine be without pictures? The most striking proof of photography’s extraordinary validity today is the increase in the number of illustrated newspapers. In them one finds everything assembled from the

40 Kerbs, “Die Epoche der Bildagenturen,” 4. [Original: “47 Tageszeitungen, 33 Stadtteilzeitungen, sowie 50 Wochenzeitungen, darunter neun Illustrierte und fünf illustrierte Wochenbeilagen großer Tageszeitungen.”]

The statistics provided by Kerbs, however, may be subject to variation. As Thomas Friedrich points out, establishing the exact number of published newspapers and magazines is impossible due to the various overlaps and a more general confusion about the types of publications. See Thomas Friedrich, “Die Berliner Zeitungslandschaft am Ende der Weimarer Republik,” in Berlin 1932. Das letzte Jahr der Weimarer Republik, ed. Diethard Kerbs and Henrick Stahr (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), 56–67, here: 59–60.

41

Friedrich, “Die Berliner Zeitungslandschaft,” 67.

42

Ibid.

43 Peter de Mendelsohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin. Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse (Berlin: Ullstein, 1985), 153. [Original: “Nirgends gab es so viele Zeitungen, und nirgends waren sie so vielgestaltig.”]

44 Kerbs, “Die illustrierte Presse am Ende der Weimarer Republik,” in Berlin 1932. Das letzte Jahr der Weimarer Republik, ed. Diethard Kerbs and Henrick Stahr (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), 68–89, here: 70.

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film diva to whatever is in reach of the camera and the audience.45 Because they were conceived as mass media, however, the illustrated papers and Illustrierte were highly sensitive to economic cycles during the Weimar Republic. Aspects such as the availability of capital or the willingness to invest, production costs such as paper and postage prices and wages as well as distribution structures profoundly influenced the emergence of new publications, the size of print runs, and the profitability of publishing enterprises. But even if some of the new publications folded soon after being founded, the continuous rise in the circulation of the most important publications up to the late 1920s, and its stagnation or only marginal decline up to 1932 in spite of the world economic crisis, demonstrates the growing status of the press during the late Weimar Republic.46 The implementation of new structures of distribution is considered to be a preparatory step for the press boom that began around 1900 and the later success of the Illustrierte as an economic model. The abolition of compulsory subscriptions and the introduction of street sales and flexible weekly subscriptions made buying newspapers and magazines affordable for a far larger number of readers.

The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), founded in 1891, also introduced a comparatively uncomplicated subscription and payment system, which consisted of filling out a postage-free reply postcard and sending it to the publisher. “Easy payment, no compulsory subscription”47 was the advertising slogan of the BIZ. The BIZ’s circulation quadrupled in the first third of the twentieth century, and it became the most important national weekly paper, with a print run of 1.9 million in 1929.

In addition to subscription revenues and street sales, publishers increasingly relied on the sale of advertising space to finance production costs, especially the high expense of printing illustrations.48 The advertising industry found that the majority of new national, regional and local illustrated newspapers and magazines offered them a highly

45 Kracauer, “Die Photographie,” 33. [Original: “Die Tageszeitungen bebildern immer mehr ihre Texte, und was wäre ein Magazin ohne Bildmaterial? Der schlagende Beweis für die ausgezeichnete Gültigkeit der Photographie in der Gegenwart wird vor allem durch die Zunahme der illustrierten Zeitungen geliefert.”]

46

Marckwardt, Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit, 43–46.

47

Kurt Korff, “Die Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung,” in 50 Jahre Ullstein. 1877–1927 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927), 280.

48 Bruhn, “Tarife für das Sichtbare,” 14.

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suitable means of reaching a broad stratum of potential customers.49 At first, advertisements almost exclusively consisted of text and simple typefaces. Graphic illustrations and photographs only entered advertising later, but then all the more thoroughly.

49 Erik L. Olson, “How Magazine Articles Portrayed Advertising from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Advertising 24, no. 3 (1995): 41–54. As Olson argues: “Prior to 1900 and the advent of most mass advertising, magazines relied almost exclusively on subscription revenues for their operating income. Magazines were therefore expensive and readers tended to be in the highet socioeconomic classes. As advertising became more acceptable to both the business and publishing communities, the increasing revenues it provided enabled subscription revenues to drop and circulation figures to soar. This advertising-financed expansion made magazines the first and only nationally distributed source of news and entertainment during the period studied.”

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3.2 Text, Illustration, Photograph: The Rise of Advertising Photography “Photography is not a foreign concept in advertising,”50 noted Moholy-Nagy in his catalogue text for the path-breaking travelling exhibition Film und Foto, or fifo, which the Deutsche Werkbund organized in Stuttgart and Berlin in 1929. Much as in early press photography, since the 1880s photographs had served as models that, according to Moholy-Nagy, “were often unscrupulously translated into the painterly or graphic.”51 Nonetheless, and this is the important point, “never in such a way that the photographic model as such made an appearance.”52 This changed now. Photography became a multifaceted and widespread advertising medium. Commercial enterprises proceeded “on a larger scale to make use of photographs to extol their products in advertisements, posters, catalogues, and other promotional printed matter.”53 The rise of advertising photography as a field in its own right is associated with the American market around 1900.54 By the early 1920s it was well established as a medium of advertising illustration. Magazines in particular used photographs with increasing frequency, and thus advanced to major vehicles for advertising.55 The American advertising industry’s most important trade journal, Advertising and Selling, mirrored this development: while in 1926, photographs made up some twenty percent of the periodical’s title pages, only two years later eighty percent of title pages featured photographs. As one of many contemporaries who reflected on the use of photography

50 László Moholy-Nagy, “Die Photographie in der Reklame,” in Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre. Eine Betrachtung der Internationalen Werkbundausstellung Film und Foto 1929, ed. Ute Eskildsen and Jan-Christopher Horak (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1979), 146–156, here: 146. [Original: “Die Photographie in der Reklame ist kein fremder Begriff.”]

51 Ibid., 146. [Original: Fotografien wurden “oft skrupellos ins Malerische, Graphische übersetzt, niemals so, dass die photographische Vorlage als solche in Erscheinung getreten wäre.”]

52

Ibid.

53 Willi Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” in Deutscher Kamera-Almanach, vol. 20 (1930), 85–100, here: 85–87. Compared to the USA, Warstat states, the value of photography as a means for modern advertising was understood relatively late in most European countries. [Original: “Unternehmen gingen in größerem Umfange dazu über sich bei der Anpreisung ihrer Waren im Inserat, im Plakat, in Katalogen und sonstigen Werbedrucksachen der Photographie zu bedienen.”]

54 This, however, does not mean that advertsing photography was a particularily American phenomenon, but rather thatthe emergence of advertising photography in Europe oocurred later. Moreover, compared to the European situation, the subject has mostly been treated by American scholarship.

55 On this matter, Sobieszek cites an advertisement by the Western Camera Publishing Company of 1904: “There is a large demand for photographs suitable for use in connection with Modern Advertising. We are in a position to know what is acceptable work and to place it where it will command the highest price.” See Sobieszek, Art of Persuasion, 25.

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in advertising, the designer Jan Tschichold commented as follows on the expansion of advertising photography, “the picture-hunger of modern man is satisfied today chiefly by photo-illustrated newspapers and magazines; and advertising (especially in America) is making ever-increasing use of photography.”56 While photography’s potential as an advertising medium was recognized relatively late in Germany in comparison to the USA,57 this area now expanded all the more rapidly. “A glance at the advertising sections of our large magazines or the advertising pillars shows how extensive the field of advertising photography has already become, [and] how clearly industry and commerce already recognize the promotional power of photographs.”58 Advertising photography as optical design was omnipresent, from magazine advertisements to large-format advertising posters. For Benjamin the visual presence, the perceptual power of advertising was comparable to that of cinema: Today, the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It tears down the stage upon which contemplation moved, and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of the film screen. And just as film does not present furniture and façades in completed forms for critical inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurls things at us with the tempo of a good film.59

56 Jan Tschichold, New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, trans. by Ruari McLean (Berkely: University of California Press, 1995), 87. [Original: “der bildhunger des modernen menschen wird hauptsächlich durch die fotografisch illustrierten zeitschriften und magazine befriedigt; die inseratreklame (vor allem in amerika), bedient sich mehr und mehr des fotos.”] in Jan Tschischold, “Fotografie und Typografie,” Die Form.

Zeitschrift des deutschen Werkbundes 3 (1928): 140–150, here: 141.

57 Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 86. As Warstat points out, the late arrival of photography in advertising is all more surprising as its advantages, it particular its mechanical character and alleged objectivity, which were of great use to advertising, were already widely acknowledged at the time. [Original: “Die späte Würdigung der Photographie als Werbemittel ist umso unverständlicher, weil die Eigenschaften, welche sie zu werbetechnischer Verwendung gewissermaßen prädestinieren, seit langer Zeit bekannt und in anderem Zusammenhange, namentlich auf wissenschaftlichem Gebiete, längst betont und ausgenützt worden sind.”]

58 Ibid., 96. [Original: “Wie umfangreich das Arbeitsgebiet der Werbephotographie heute bereits ist, wie klar Industrie und Handel schon die Werbekraft der Photographie erkannt haben, das beweist uns ein Blick in die Anzeigenteile unserer großen Zeitschriften oder auf den Plastiksäulen.”]

59 Walter Benjamin, “This space is for rent,” [1928] in Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demenz, trans. by Edmund Jephott (New York: Schocken, 2007), 85–86. [Original: “Der heute wesenhafteste, der merkantile Blick ins Herz der Dinge heißt Reklame. Sie reißt den freien Spielraum der Betrachtung nieder und rückt die Dinge so gefährlich nah uns vor die Stirn, wie aus dem Kinorahmen ein Auto, riesig anwachsend, auf uns zu zittert. Und wie das Kino Möbel und Fassaden nicht in unvollendeten Figuren einer kritischen Betrachtung vorführt, sondern allein ihre sture, sprunghafte Nähe sensationell ist, so kurbelt echte Reklame die Dinge heran und hat ein Tempo, das dem guten Film entspricht.” In Walter Benjamin, “Diese Flächen sind zu vermieten,” Einbahnstraße, in Walter Benjamin, Medienästhetische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 198. first published in Walter Benjamin, with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), 131.]

35

A rough analysis of the mass circulation Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the illustrated magazines Uhu, Koralle, Scherl’s Magazin and Die Dame confirms this development.

In the period between 1926 and 1933, the format and number of advertising pages increased radically. Far more importance was placed on advertisements. The use of photographs increased continually in comparison to pure text ads and illustrations, especially in advertisements for luxury and hygiene products – and photo cameras. Yet, it is important to note that photographs did not replace the tradition of painted and drawn illustration, as can be seen from several ads in magazine Die Dame (Figures 1 and 2).

As the representative example shows, photography and drawings existed side-by-side.

However, as a general tendency, drawn illustrations, which could claim the advantage of incorporating colour, were increasingly relegated to high-quality and high-budget full-page advertisements. Photographs served especially as illustrations for the mass of smaller advertisements and gradually displaced the drawing as the quantitatively dominant advertising medium.

 

Figure 1: Combination of photographs and drawings in advertisements, Die Dame 55, no. 21, 1928, 48.

36

Figure 2: Combination of photographs and drawings in advertisements (double-page), Die Dame 55, no. 21, 1928, 46–47.

In Germany, the development of advertising in magazines and newspapers and the use of photographs established itself quickly during the late Weimar Republic. Although the world economic crisis of 1929 caused the advertising market to stagnate, advertising was now inconceivable without photography. While, for example, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung’s 32-page issue of 30 May 192660 featured one full-page advertisement and thirteen pages of half- and quarter-page ads, nearly half of its 6 October 1929 issue61 consisted of advertising. With forty-eight pages in all, this issue had eleven full-page ads and a total of twelve pages composed of half- and quarter-page advertisements as well as smaller text ads. The figures are similar for Scherl’s Magazin, which appeared for the first time in 1925: the number of pages devoted to advertising and photographic ads rose steadily. In the years 1926 to 1929, the number of advertising pages nearly doubled from 8½ to sixteen. The economic crisis, whose effects were already being felt in late 1929, meant not the decline but the stagnation of advertising pages at a

60 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 35, no. 22, May 30, 1926.

61 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 38, no. 40, October 6, 1929.

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similar level. But advertising did not merely take up more space quantitatively in the illustrated magazine: while in 1926 advertisements had been placed in the back part, from early 1928 they wandered to the front section and the first pages. For the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Scherl’s Magazin, Uhu, Koralle and Die Dame, the increasing use of photos as mediums of illustration and advertising is undeniable, a development that necessarily found imitators.

The expansion of photography in advertising saw the maturing of an economic model whose course had already been set in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In order to finance their production costs, especially the expensive printing of pictures, newspapers and magazines increasingly depended on the sale of advertising space, a practice that expanded first mainly in the USA and led to the emergence of advertising agencies as well as the cartelization of advertising.62 As the advertising industry soon came to rely massively on visual design, this set in motion a sort of chain reaction, in which the individual vectors determined one another: advertising financed the magazines and the printing of pictures, facilitated the founding of new periodicals, and accelerated the use and distribution of pictures and photographs.

Photography was favoured as an advertising medium for several reasons. First of all, photographs were perceived as credible, as Willi Warstat proclaimed in 1930, speaking of the widespread notion of photographic representation, which was “highly significant for the psychology of advertising.” After all, “the audience has no trouble believing that the photographic representation of an object is more precise and closer to reality than a drawn portrayal.”63 In the USA, researchers had already studied the effect of photography on advertising customers in 1932. According to a survey of 4,000 readers by George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, people found photographs more appealing and effective than other kinds of advertising illustration.64 Photography was also regarded as a very modern and versatile mode of illustration. The new and varied modes of representation in photography corresponded to the restless search for evernew advertising images, since “the new and previously unseen, in particular attracts 62

Bruhn, “Tarife für das Sichtbare,” 14.

63 Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 86. [Original: “Denn das Publikum glaubt eben ohne weiteres, das die photographische Darstellung eines Gegenstandes genauer und der Wirklichkeit entsprechender sei als die zeichnerische Wiedergabe.”]

64 The mentioned Gallup survey was published in 1932 in the periodicals Advertising and Selling, Printer’s Ink Monthly and Advertising Age, see note 90 in Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 149.

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the gaze and attention with especial power.”65 Last but not least, photographs were often less expensive than drawn illustrations. No binding rates or pricing standards existed for advertising photographs, and payment was subject to negotiation. To be sure, drawn illustrations had the advantage of trenchant and abstracting representation and greater ease of translation into colour printing, but photography permitted the more cost-effective design of ads and thus prevailed particularly in the years following the Crash of 1929.66 As a mark of modern consumer society, growing competition encouraged industry and commerce to invest more and more in promoting their products and services, unleashing a veritable competition over advertising, which evolved into a profitable business for photographers, advertising designers, photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries and the services associated with them. “A new, lucrative market [is emerging] here for professional photographers,” according to the contemporary critic Willi Warstat, “and a new specialized branch of the photographic profession, ...that of the advertising photographer.”67 The profession of the advertising photographer, a “professional identity,“68 with its own networks and standards (and by extension that of image banks), arose alongside that of the press photographer.

Much as the Illustrierte did for the photo reportage, advertising served as an additional experimental ground for photography. The concept of advertising or promotion was extremely broad and referred to both advertisements for consumer goods and services and publicity for events of all kinds. Recent scholarship has pointed to the structural proximity between the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, the New Typography, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the New Vision.69 As the eco65 Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 87. [Original: Die neuen und vielfältigen Darstellungsmodi der Fotografie korrespondierten mit der unablässigen Suche nach immer neuen Werbebildern, da “besonders das Neue, noch nie Dagewesene den Blick und die Aufmerksamkeit mit besonderer Kraft auf sich zieht.”]

66

Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 149.

67 Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 98. [Original: “Für Berufsphotographen [entsteht] hier ein neues, ertragreiches Absatzfeld und ein neuer photographischer Spezialberuf...der des Werbephotographen.”]

68 Wilkenson, “New Heraldry,” 23.

69 For the convergence of avant-garde art, typography and photography during Weimar Republic see Sherwin Simmons, “Advertising seizes control of life: Berlin Dada and the power of advertising,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1999): 121–146; Bernd Stiegler, “Das Typophoto. Jan Tschichold und die epistemologischen Grundlagen der Typografie,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 28, no. 108 (2008): 39–46; Olivier Lugon, “La photographie des typographes,” Etudes Photographiques, no. 20 (2007): 100–119.

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nomic motor of this development, the intersection of art and utilitarian photography was accordingly also expressed in advertising design, which incorporated modes of representation from contemporary art and art photography. This intersection became visible above all in the use of photomontage as a creative vehicle in contemporary art and advertising, as Curt Glaser’s 1931 exhibition review explains: The path however soon led from this free play [of art] to practical application. Photomontage became a sub-area of commercial art and an important resource in modern advertising. From book jackets and advertisements to promotional brochures, photomontage is conquering broad areas of advertising previously dominated by drawings, and the documentary nature of the photographic material involved lends this new advertising vehicle the apparent reliability of pictorial reportage.70

The fifo of 1929 devoted one of the exhibition’s five thematic rooms to so-called advertising art (Reklamekunst).71 Artists and critics explored the interrelationship between art and advertising, and propaganda. Various art and industrial design schools offered integrated advertising design, typography and photography courses. The most prominent example is the printing and advertising workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar, which the designer Herbert Bayer founded and ran from 1925 to 1928.72 The diverse potential markets offered by advertising were an essential motor for photography’s aesthetic and technical development and experimentation, since, according to MoholyNagy, “Advertising can use anything that heightens its effectiveness.”73 Photography’s

70 Curt Glaser, “Fotomontage, Ausstellung im Lichthof des ehemaligen Kunstgewerbemuseums, 25.4.– 31.5.1931,” ed. Staatliche Kunstbibliothek (Berlin: Reckendorf, 1931) [Original: “Von diesem freien Spiel aber, führte der Weg sehr bald zu praktischer Verwendung. Fotomontage wurde ein Teilgebiet gebrauchsgrafischer Arbeit und ein wichtiges Hilfsmittel neuzeitlicher Werbung. Vom Buchumschlag, vom Inserat bis zur Werbebroschüre erobert die Fotomontage große Gebiete der Reklame, die früher der Zeichner beherrschte, und der dokumentarische Charakter des verwendeten Fotografiematerials gibt diesem neuen Mittel der Werbung den Anschein der Zuverlässigkeit bildmäßiger Reportage.”]

71 Warstat noted that the importance and the growing status of Reklamekunst was cemented by the display of particularly promising examples at fifo. [Original: “Wie wichtig Werbefotografie ist, das bewies vor allem auch die Werkbundausstellung Film und Fotografie (fifo) in Stuttgart im Sommer dieses Jahres. Dort war eine sehr interessante Kollektion von werbephotographischen Entwürfen...zusammengekommen.”] in Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 86.

72 Herbert Bayer (1900–1985) emigrated to the United States in 1938, where he joined the inner circle of European artists and designers who deeply shaped American industrial design from the 1940s onwards.

73 Moholy-Nagy, “Die Photographie in der Reklame,” 148. [Original: Die vielfältigen Absatzmöglichkeiten, welche die Werbung bot, waren ein essentieller Antrieb für die ästhetische und technische Entwicklung und Erprobung der Fotografie, da, so Moholy-Nagy, “Reklame alles verwenden kann, was ihre Wirksamkeit steigert.”]

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pursuit of effectiveness and its means of representation and expression were now virtually unlimited.74 According to Warstat, advertising art opened up “an infinitely broad and varied field of endeavour for photography, and the advertising photographer had no need to cling to a single scheme and lapse into a dreary monotony and style.”75 Moreover, the heightened willingness to invest increasingly translated into the testing of high-quality printing technologies and materials. The “awakening interest in the key economic factors” led “quite suddenly to a refined development of photographic advertising technology, or – why not say it? – photographic advertising art,” so that, as Warstat went on to suggest, “it is worthwhile to examine and elucidate this field in its context.”76 As this sketch, which will be developed in Part II, suggests, advertising offered a new and highly promising market for photography. The economic potential of advertising propelled aesthetic and technical experiments, thereby fostering the further evolution of the medium. Or, to summarize in the words of Roland Marchand, “the photographic image itself became a consumer product,”77 imbedded in a capitalist economy designed for the consumer society of the nascent twentieth century. It thus seems justified to claim that the expansion of the picture market and the emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of new agencies and commercial picture libraries, which were the beneficiaries and catalysts of this economy, can be traced back to the phenomenon of advertising and to the genre of the Illustrierte as one of the most significant advertising vehicles.

74 As Wilkinson points out: “There is an absence of aesthetic consensus among advertising photographers: contemporary professional journals are rich in polemic both those who used experimental styles, and from those who deplored ‘stunt’ photography. However, this debate is, in a sense, more indicative of the unity of the profession than its diversity. In the previous decade [that is to say in the 1920s] advertising photographers could not have held such a debate because there was no forum for them to do so, and less of a sense of shared professional activity.” in Wilkinson, “The New Heraldry,” 23.

75

Warstat, “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst,” 98.

76 Ibid., 85–86. [Original: “Das erwachende Interesse der maßgeblichen wirtschaftlichen Faktoren führte in fast sprunghaftem Emporschnellen zu einer Hochentwicklung der photographischen Werbetechnik, oder sagen wir ruhig: der photographischen Werbekunst…dass es sich lohnt, dieses Gebiet einmal im Zusammenhange zu betrachten und zu beleuchten.”]

77 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 153.

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4. Photography and Copyright Photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries deal in the licensing and management of rights for the use and reproduction of photographs. As a consequence, the picture market evolved and changed congruently to the development of photographic image rights, which assumed increasingly concrete forms in the course of the twentieth century. If this chapter proposes the thesis of the mobility of photography and the mobilization of images by photography, the state of image rights in the 1920s and 1930s plays an essential role. After all, the agencies’ remits and raison d’être increasingly emerged in this period along with the definition and handling of image rights.

German and international law responded to the mechanical reproducibility and increasingly ephemeral nature of images by including photography in intellectual property law.78 At the heart of this legislation was the control over the distribution and reproduction of images. The transfer of the concept of copyright to photography was (and because of its dual nature as medium and object, remains) not unproblematic, however. From its very beginning, the concept of copyright for photography was built on a paradox, or a hybrid, that is the idea of the original on the one hand and its reproductive character on the other hand, between the theoretical definition and the inadequacies in the actual handling of photographic image rights. It repeatedly ran up against obstacles, for, as the legal scholar Josef Kohler remarked in 1908, legislators “did not really know what to make of it [photography].”79 If one understands “the law as a seismograph that allows us to grasp analytically the fissures and upheavals that the apparatus unleashed in scholarship and art,”80 the initial debates that led to copyright law and particularly the detailed reform discussion during the late Weimar Republic are symptomatic of this paradox. The present

78 Monika Dommann, “Der Apparat und das Individuum. Die Verrechtlichung technischer Bilder (1860– 1920),” in Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten. Wissenschafts- und Technikbilder seit der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Martina Heßler (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 347–367.

79 Josef Kohler, Kunstwerkrecht, Gesetz vom 9. Januar 1907 (Stuttgart, 1908), 17. [Original: “Man weiß eigentlich nicht was man mit ihr (der Fotografie) anfangen soll.”]

80 Dommann, “Der Apparat und das Individuum,” 350. [Original: Versteht man das “Recht als Seismograph, um die Risse und Erschütterungen, die in der Wissenschaft und Kunst durch den Apparat ausgelöst werden, analytisch zu greifen,” so lassen sich die Debatten die zum Urheberrecht geführt haben und insbesondere die detaillierten Reformdiskussionen während der Weimarer Republik als Spiegel dieser Problematik interpretieren.]

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chapter will propose that the extensive and at times highly controversial discussions conducted in Germany between 1928 and 1932 need to be understood as clear reactions and counter-reactions to the prevailing concerns about the loss of control over the distribution and reproduction of images brought about by their reproducibility and omnipresence. The evaporation effect, the threatened dissolution of the art work in the “here and now,”81 as Walter Benjamin put it (and the alleged democratization), set off by mechanical recording and reproduction devices naturally affected all of the arts, but the remarks that follow will concentrate on the legal treatment of photography.

The Development of Photographic Copyright The rapid development of photography into an industry and its economic relevance especially from the late nineteenth century on elicited a great interest in redefining the legal framing conditions. In the period between 1860 and 1920, legislation concentrated on the fundamental issue of property in the photographic image and the concomitant right to reproduce and use pictures.82 Did the photos and negatives belong to the photographer or the client? What was the legal framework for exploiting photographic images? What rights were assigned to the person/s depicted? Deliberations centred on definitions of photography either as a purely mechanical, or as an artistic method of generating images. While the opponents of copyright protection for photographs stressed the mechanical nature of photography, its supporters argued that the photographic process was analogous to artistic creation.

With the Copyright Act on Works of Art and Photography of 9 January 1907 (Gesetz betreffend das Urheberrecht an Werken der Künste und der Photographie),83 or Art Copyright Act of 1907 for short, German legislators responded, among other questions, to the medium’s prevailing defencelessness against unlawful reproduction and use by third parties. In this law, photography and art were treated together for the first

81 Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).

82

Dommann, “Der Apparat und das Individuum,” 352.

83 The Gesetz betreffend das Urheberrecht an Werken der bildenden Künste und der Photographie of January 19, 1907 or short Kunsturhebergesetz (KUG) was in vigour until the revision of the German copyright legislation in 1965.

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time,84 whereas the new media of film and radio were combined in a separate law, the Copyright Act on Works of Literature and Music of 19 June 1901 (Gesetz betreffend das Urheberrecht an Werken der Literatur und der Tonkunst). This proximity to the artwork ushered in a paradigm shift in the legal definition of photographs, as they were placed in relation to one another. Despite their juxtaposition, though, the rules applied to photography and the fine arts varied in order to articulate the different status of art works and photographs. Photographs were accorded a copyright for ten years after their appearance or production, while works of art were protected against unlawful reproduction and distribution for fifty years after the death of the artist (post mortem auctoris).

The Art Copyright Act of 1907 and the ensuing amendments were concessions to the steadily growing number of professional press and illustration photographers and their influential associations. The copyright law for photography consequently developed chiefly in relation to press and commercial photography, as an attempt to strengthen the rights of photographers in light of improved reproducibility. The fact that photography fell under the Art Copyright Act of 1907 and enjoyed (albeit reduced) copyright protection thus points to the economic interests and political authorities that came into play in the face of the threatened loss of control over images. Together with its subsequent amendments, the 1907 law formed the basis of German copyright law on photography, and until the introduction of the new Copyright Act of 1965, it would shape the social uses of photography and redistribute the rights of disposal of producers and consumers of pictures and the individuals represented in them.

With the focus on authorship and the recognition that the photographer’s achievement went beyond the purely mechanical, however, copyright protection for the medium of photography negated a key aspect. This aspect referred to the way in which photographs were often used and produced, and one which was highly relevant and well established in the context of the picture market: photography as a ‘copy machine’ and a means of mobilizing images. Or, as the historian and legal scholar Monika Dommann puts it, “in order to justify according property rights in technical images as well, they must be labelled works of art, which can only occur at the expense of negating the apparatus.”85 84 Parallel to the Art Copyright Act, literature and music were combined in the Copyright Act on Works of Literature and Music of 19 June 1901 (Gesetz betreffend das Urheberrecht an Werken der Literatur und der Tonkunst vom 19. Juni 1901).

85 Dommann, “Der Apparat und das Individuum,” 366. [Original: “Um die Eigentumsrechte auch für technische Bilder zu begründen, müssen sie deshalb zum Kunstwerk erklärt werden, was nur zum Preis der Negation des Apparats möglich ist.”]

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In the reproducibility of the photograph, and especially the “reproduction of the reproduction,” or Nachdruck (reprinting), on which many image banks relied on, the apparatus was explicitly in the foreground. Reprinting undoubtedly collided with copyright and the attendant construction of the photographer as author and the idea of artistic production. If, as was mentioned above, no one knew precisely how to define the photograph for the purposes of copyright, the main reason was its potential of (infinite) reproducibility. Yet, reproduction by photographic means was treated rather unmistakably in the development of copyright protection. The 1907 law, for example, stipulated in section §15 (1) that only the copyright holder has the right to “reproduce, commercially distribute and commercially display this reproduction by means of mechanical or optical devices.”86 The prerequisite for the right to reproduction (including the production of another work of visual art or photography by emulating an existing work,”87) and commercial exploitation was the official consent of the author or owner of the original work. What is important here is that this also included a provision that no changes could be made to the work, the title of the picture, or the designation of the author.

This consent was rarely obtained, however. The new legal arrangement clearly contradicted everyday business practice, in which the rights of photographers were only very rarely respected. Thus, almost immediately after the Art Copyright Act of 1907 went into effect, interested parties were already vehemently suggesting improvements.

In a 1911 manifesto, for instance, the Berlin photographer and chairman of the Central Association of German Photographers’ Federations (Central-Verein Deutscher Photographen Verbände) Waldemar Titzenthaler88 criticized the “miserable state of business

86 KUG, § 15 (1): [Original: “Der Urheber hat die ausschließliche Befugnis, das Werk zu vervielfältigen, gewerbsmäßig zu verbreiten und gewerbsmäßig mittels mechanischer oder optischer Einrichtungen vorzuführen.”]

87 KUG, § 15 (2): [Original:” Auch wer durch Nachbildung eines bereits vorhandenen Werkes ein anderes Werk der bildenden Künste oder der Photographie hervorbringt, hat die in Abs. 1 bezeichneten Befugnisse; jedoch darf er diese Befugnisse, sofern der Urheber des Originalwerkes gleichfalls Schutz genießt, nur mit dessen Einwilligung ausüben.”]

88 Waldemar Franz Hermann Titzenthaler (1869–1937) was under contract with the photographic agency Firma Zander und Labisch, working among others for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and later for Die Dame. In 1897, he founded his own studio and and became one of the first photographers specialized on advertising photography. In 1901 he joined the Freie Photographische Vereinigung (Independent photographic society) and soon became one of its directors. In this function, he served as a consultant on photography in lawsuits and advised the Berlin industry chamber, see Jörg Krichbaum, Lexikon der Fotografen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981).

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between photographers and publishers.”89 According to Titzenthaler, not only did publishers wait until publication to pay for the pictures they acquired and categorically neglect to mention the photographer’s name, they also only paid the photographer a “paltry sum for permission to reproduce the image and resold the stereotypes and electrotypes as they saw fit.”90 The “miserable state of business,” according to Titzenthaler, was further reflected in a proposal by the photographer and advocate Fritz Hansen for the revision of the 1907 Act. Hansen submitted a draft for the regulation of interests between photographers and newspaper and magazine publishers, which concentrated especially on the issue of reprints.91 The reproduction of a photograph from a publication – and Hansen referred mainly to the topical press – should oblige the publishers to pay the author a reprint fee. Moreover, they should also immediately inform the author of the reproduction of the photograph. Hansen’s proposal targeted the powerful publishing companies as well as the commercial picture suppliers, who clearly profited from the prevailing discrepancy between the theoretical achievement of copyright protection and actual practice in the picture market. However, this was less an isolated phenomenon than an established practice, a long-standing ‘culture’ of disregard for the terms of copyright and of unlawful reproduction in the press and publishing business, which commercial picture suppliers used for their own ends.

The Culture of Disregard This culture of a rather casual handling of copyright law in the picture market and the difficulties to implement the law properly had its roots in a number of factors that will be retraced in the following section.

89 Waldemar Titzenthaler, “Vorschläge zur Regelung des Geschäftsverkehrs zwischen Photographen und Verlagsanstalten durch den Central-Verband Deutscher Photographen Vereine,” Photograph no. 80 (1911): 317– 318.

90 Ibid. [Original: Auch würden diese dem Urheber nur einen “geringfügigen Betrag für die Reproduktionserlaubnis bezahlen” sowie “Klischees und Galvanos beliebig weiterverkaufen.”]

91 Draft by Fritz Hansen Fritz Hansen draft [Original: “7.a) Die Reproduktion einer Photographie aus einer Zeitschrift soll nicht als unberechtigter Nachdruck aufgefasst werden, wenn die Redaktion sich zur Zahlung des Wiederabdruckshonorars an den Urheber verpflichtet; b) Ist die Reproduktion verboten, darf der Wiederabdruck nur mit vorheriger Einwilligung des Urhebers erfolgen; c) die unberechtigte Vervielfältigung wird nach dem Gesetz vom 1. Januar 1907; 4. Abschnitt des Urhebers erfolgen; d) der Nachdruck ist von der Redaktion dem Urheber sofort zur Kenntnis zu geben.”], in Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie V. Probleme zwischen Fotografen und Redaktionen und der Beginn der Bildtelegrafie in Deutschland bis 1914,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 59 (1996): 33–50, here: 39.

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Supported by publishing law, it was long common practice for publishers to (re) use illustrations for their other publications or to sell them. As the main customers for photographs, publishers argued from a different legal perspective. They traced their right to reutilize pictures not to copyright law, but to the 1893 publishing regulations of the German book trade organization Börsenverein deutscher Buchhändler, which dealt with reprints not of images but of texts. Since the photographer had been paid a fixed amount for the initial use, publishers tended to claim ownership and thus considered the reprint or reselling of photographs permitted. A further source of the culture of disregard appears to lie in the earlier legislation on intellectual property: In the Copyright Act to Protect Works of Photography Against Unauthorized Reprinting of 10 January 1876 (Gesetz betreffend das Urheberrecht an Werken der Photographie gegen unbefugten Nachdruck), which preceded the law of 1907, reprinting was clearly regulated in favour of clients and end users: the photographer, who in this law functioned not as an artist but as a manufacturer (Verfertiger), was accorded a copyright of only five years.

The decisive point, though, (and juridical weakness from the photographer’s point of view) was that the replication of so-called industrial products was fundamentally permissible without regard to intellectual property law. Thus anyone was allowed to reproduce and commercially exploit printed photographs such as postcards, newspaper illustrations and advertising pictures at any time. Finally, it was the harsh climate in the picture market that nourished the lax handling of photographic image rights.

Consistent compliance with copyright law was difficult to implement given the relative power of the major publishing houses and the fierce competition among photographers.

Photographers received a one-time fee and had no influence over the further use and potential reproduction of their works. Prints not made and reproduced by the photographers themselves circulated among editorial departments and advertising agencies with no further details about their origins. Photographs were used, reused, cut, stored or discarded. In practice, copyright law led to permanent violations, which, because of the power differential between publishers or advertisers and photographers, rarely led to the latter claiming their rights or seeking legal remedies.92 Photographic agencies formed not least because of these abuses, since the ‘agency’ as a distribution and management structure promised to represent photographers administratively and ensure that customers respected their rights.

92 KUG § 31–50 foresaw the indemnification, fines and in some cases even the destruction of the illegal reproductions.

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The concrete application of intellectual property rights during the 1920s and 1930s and the status of photo agencies can be demonstrated by examining contemporary Illustrierte such as Scherl’s Magazin. While fifty-one out of the seventy-four photographs that appeared in the September 1926 issue of Scherl’s Magazin mention no copyright information whatsoever, the May 1931 issue printed only forty-two out of seventy-one photographs without such information. The same was true of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the illustrated magazine Die Dame. Mentions of the author or copyright holder of the printed photos, which were rather uncommon in the early twentieth century, appear in nearly half of photographic illustrations from the mid-1920s on. The more prominently placed photographs were within the magazine, the more likely it was for copyright information to appear. Large-format photos and those that occurred within a series of pictures, for example, tended to be ‘signed’ more often than small-format, individual photos. One may say that mentioning the origins of pictures was more likely when the photographs were explicitly orchestrated and dramatized than in the case of incidental, nondescript, and ‘anonymous’ photographs. However, the majority of mentions named not the individual photographers, but the photo agencies. The Berlin agencies Zander & Labisch, Senneken and Mauritius and Scherl’s in-house picture department, the French Atelier d’Ora, and the American agencies Keystone, Underwood & Underwood or Wide World were represented in every issue. Unless it was an explicitly artistic work by a well-known photographer, the author of the photograph disappeared behind the name of the commercial picture supplier. Thus the photographer did not appear as the official provider of the image, but the agency, which not only held the rights of reproduction and use, but also actively claimed and managed them. Moreover, in their role as intermediaries between producers and users, it was the agencies and not the photographers that negotiated with the publishers or other customers. Although one can speak of a gradual institutionalization of copyright protection for photographs, mentioning the author or origin of images was by no means standard practice yet in the 1920s and 1930s.

Reform Discussions In light of the glaring discrepancy between theory and practice, the 1907 Art Copyright Act was subjected to several amendments in subsequent decades. For all that, it was mainly the reform discussions in the late Weimar Republic, that is, from 1928 to

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1932, which again challenged the apparently secure principles of the 1907 law. Was it truly legitimate to combine photography and the fine arts in a single law? Should photography not be treated in a separate law? How could a clear distinction be drawn between the craft and the chemical-optical process of photography, between art photography and utilitarian photography? The necessity or the renewed desire for changes to the law is evidence, albeit indirect evidence, of photography’s dynamism and the upheavals in the media and ideas that occurred at this time.

The catalysts for the urgent need to revise copyright law for all the arts were technical innovations and their rapid establishment, particularly the various visual and sound media and their material devices. The reform discussions emerged from the recognition that the “technical developments in the field of the exploitation of objects of copyright were difficult to reconcile with the existing laws.”93 Legislation had to react, but at the same time the questions raised by reproducibility were becoming increasingly complex. The reform discussions were conducted on both the national and the international level, the latter within the framework of the International Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. In 1928, more than 40 years after the first international copyright agreement, the Berne Convention of 1886, 37 member states94 convened in Rome with the aim of formulating new guidelines for international copyright protection. While these guidelines – the Revised Berne Convention of 1928 – were not binding, each of the member states were encouraged to use them as a model for revising its own national legislation. The negotiations centred on the issue of mechanical reproducibility and its consequences. For the first time, individual sub-committees were formed for the media of photography, radio and film.95 The formulation of the droit moral (moral right) for works of art, literature and music was considered the most significant outcome of the Revised Berne Convention: defined as the non-transferable copyright, the droit moral gave authors the possibility of transferring only the right to use their works to a third party, without ever losing their copyright, This provision was an attempt to counter or at least regulate the anticipated mass 93 Ralf-M. Vogt, Die urheberrechtlichen Reformdiskussionen in Deutschland während der Weimarer Republic und des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2004), 32. [Original: “Die Reformdiskussionen resultierten aus der Erkenntnis, dass die technischen Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der Verwertung von Urheberechtsgut nur schwer mit den bestehenden Gesetzen in Einklang gebracht werden konnten.”]

94 In contrast to most European countries as well as Canada, Austrialia and Brazil, the USA was not an official member of the Berne Convention; they did, however, participate in the sessions as observers.

95

Vogt, Die urheberrechtlichen Reformdiskussionen, 22.

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distribution by means of technical reproduction, which was already a reality and was creating economies in its own right. The droit moral, however was rejected my the majority, and thus abandoned. As for the protection period, while detailed provisions were set down for the new media of cinema, radio and sound recordings, the guidelines for photography and its legal interpretation went into a different (eventually unanticipated) direction. From the standpoint of photographers and photographers’ associations, the Revised Berne Convention scarcely brought the hoped-for improvements. On the contrary: the ten-year term of copyright was not extended, but retained. In addition, photography was treated independently from art, in contrast to German copyright law.

The German representatives at the Rome meeting interpreted this distinction as implying that “works of photography do not constitute literary or artistic works, since the photograph is the result of a mechanical-chemical process, subject at most to the personal influence of the photographer.”96 Following the Revised Berne Convention, the reform discussions in Germany took shape. While the German Art Copyright Act of 1907 was largely consonant with the international copyright protection proposed by the Revised Berne Convention, the latter provoked a renewed fundamental legal discussion about the legitimacy and applicability of copyright to photographs. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the reform discussions did not only concern photography, but copyright law as a whole. The concrete reform suggestions and drafts were proposed by jurists, who on the one hand represented interest groups, such as publishers, broadcasting companies, manufacturers and artists’ or photographers’ associations, and on the other served as members of the Copyright Commission of the German Association for the Protection of Commercial Property (Verein für den Schutz des gewerblichen Eigentums), which in turn acted as an advisory board for the German Ministry of Justice. These reform suggestions, which were referred to as private drafts (Privatentwurf) accordingly carried substantial weight.

Depending on their orientation, the reform suggestions referred to various forms of artistic expression or “works of the intellect” (Geisteswerke). Two of the four semi-official submissions, by the jurists Willy Hoffmann and Alexander Elster, treated photography.

Inspired by the Revised Berne Convention, Alexander Elster’s 1929 draft proposed what

96 Ibid. [Original: Darüber hinaus, wurde die Fotografie im Gegensatz zum geltenden deutschen Urheberrecht gesondert behandelt, was wiederum als Ansicht gewertet wurde dass, “es sich bei den Werken der Photographie nicht um Werke der Literatur oder Kunst handle, da die Photographie ein Ergebnis eines mechanischchemischen Vorgangs sei, den der Photograph bestenfalls persönlich beeinflussen könne.”]

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was probably the most radical amendment of the Art Copyright Act of 1907. Elster argued, first of all, that photography should be removed from the Art Copyright Act. The protection of photographs should be treated in a special law, separate from art. Second, a stricter distinction should be made between the works of photography and the photographic process. Certain photographs – and Elster was referring here to “photographs of photographs … the manufacture of photographs from a two-dimensional original [and] photomechanical (offset-) printing”97 – were denied the status of individual works.

Instead, they could be placed under the existing Design Protection Act (Musterschutzgesetz), together with catalogues, instruction manuals, patterns and models.98 Elster believed that his suggested reform was justified by the fact that “photographic ‘copyright’ was increasingly recognized to be an anomaly in the overall picture of copyright law, and its legitimacy was tenable only because of a certain kinship with the industrial arts.”99 Both Hoffmann and Elster were of the opinion that photographs could by no means be viewed as equivalent to works of art, but could in certain justified cases be works deserving protection as art that fell under the protection of the industrial arts and design. Both men found the widespread view that “works of photography are not literary or artistic works, since the photograph is the product of a mechanical-chemical process,”100 confirmed in the Revised Berne Convention of 1928. Elster, who was clearly sceptical of photography, criticized its inclusion in the protection of artworks as “a sign that there is no downward limit to the work of art.”101 Moreover, Elster regarded the acknowledgement that the concept of the individual work could apply to photography as plainly dangerous for art. The copyright committee, which acted as an advisory body to the Ministry of Justice and to which Hoffmann and Elster belonged, consequently unanimously rejected the protection of photography under art copyright in a future 97 Ibid., 52. [Original: Bestimmten Fotografien, und damit meinte Elster die “Photographie der Photographie..., die Herstellung von Klischees nach zweidimensionaler Vorlage…photomechanische (Offset-) Druckverfahren” wurde jedoch der Werkcharakter abgesprochen.]

98

Ibid.

99 Alexander Elster, Urheber- und Erfinder, Warenzeichen- und Wettbewerbsrecht. Lehrbücher und Grundbegriffe der Rechtswissenschaften (Berlin, Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1928), 182. See also an earlier publication Alexander Elster, “Gibt es ein Urheberrecht des nachschaffenden Künstlers,” Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberschutz GRUR (1927): 42–50.

100 Vogt, Die urheberrechtlichen Reformdiskussionen, 182. [Original: Begründet sah Elster seinen Reformvorschlag dadurch, dass “das photographische Urheberrecht immer mehr als eine Anomalie im Gesamtbild des Urheberrechts erkannt wurde, und seine Berechtigung nur durch eine gewisse Zugehörigkeit zum Kunstgewerbe haltbar war.”]

101 Elster, Urheber- und Erfinder, Warenzeichen- und Wettbewerbsrecht, 180. [Original: Elster, welcher der Fotografie spürbar skeptisch gegenüber stand, kritisierte, dass die Einbeziehung der Fotografie in den Kunstschutz “ein Zeichen dafür [war], dass sich das Kunstwerk nicht nach untenhin abgrenzen lässt.”]

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copyright act. It called for revoking the photograph’s status as an individual work, while recognizing (not further specified) exceptions.

But what exactly explains the overwhelmingly negative attitude of Elster and Hoffmann, and correspondingly of the German copyright committee and the Revised Berne Convention, towards recognizing photographs as individual works? Why, in spite of the increasing professionalization of photographers, the emancipation of photography, and the entry of photography into everyday life but also into avant-garde art, was copyright not tightened? Why this conceptual regression?

The answers to these questions are to be found in the reproducibility of photography. In contrast to the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century, by the 1920s and 1930s the mechanical nature of photography and its potential for abundant replication was undeniable. Anything could be photographed, anything reproduced.

Cheap and easy reproduction, improvements in printing technology, the widespread introduction of the 35-mm camera and the roll film, the rapid increase in photographic production, the omnipresence of the photograph in scholarship, the arts, and advertising, its presence in magazines and newspapers and on advertising posters – all of this emphasized the mechanical, constantly reproducible, repeatable, mass quality of photography. The mass nature and variety, the very abundance of photography, was diametrically opposed to the uniqueness and singularity of the work of art upon which copyright was based, and carried this concept for photography ad absurdum. The clear emergence of the mechanical nature of photographs and their mass appearance in the 1920s and 1930s consequently provided the impetus for the demand that a clear distinction be drawn between explicitly artistic photography and ‘mere photography,’ as Elster called it.

The deliberations of the German copyright committee proved unsuccessful, however, in implementing its recommendation to remove photography from the protections of the Art Copyright Act. Opposing attempts to strengthen the position of the photographer were, however, also doomed to failure. As a compromise, in its official draft of 1932102 the German Ministry of Justice saw fit not to change the copyright provisions concerning photography at all, that is, neither to weaken nor to strengthen them, de102 Although the draft of 1932 was submitted as an official document, the reform was only realized eight year later with the general copyright reform. This reform of 1940 extended the protection period from ten to twenty-five years.

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spite the abuses cited in the debate. How can this reticence on the part of the Ministry of Justice be explained?

One reason for this reluctance to strengthen copyright for photographs at this time was the power of the publishing companies and the picture market. The commercial users, whether publishing houses or photo agencies, had little interest in combating the abuses for which they were responsible and from which they profited. As an expression of not only social but also economic interests, legislators thus saw no reason to expand the protection and with it the control over photographic reproduction. On the contrary: they were keen to avoid implementing any changes. The fact, however, that reform was being discussed so intensely at this time, and that reform suggestions were given an official, political forum between 1928 and 1932, points indirectly to the dynamism and ubiquity of photography. Such a debate would presumably have received little attention earlier. Thus the most significant effect of the reform discussions was the renewed challenge to the character of the photograph as an individual work versus photography as a copy machine.103 In conclusion, the reform discussions on copyright during the late Weimar Republic proved decisive for the moment of the emergence of photography as well as the new media. They were indicators not just of the massive upheavals in the media, but also of the difficulty of grasping the new media and technical reproducibility in legal terms.

In comparison to cinema, radio, and gramophone records, photography was not quite a new medium. Nevertheless, it underwent such a significant accelerated development in the 1920s and 1930s that the latent uncertainty over how to treat photography reawakened legislatively. As we have seen, requests for changes were submitted not long after the enactment of the Art Copyright Act of 1907, which defined copyright protection for photography more precisely. Photographers and their interest groups criticized the discrepancy between official copyright provisions and actual practice in the picture market. It was not until towards the end of the Weimar Republic that the reform discussions assumed a concrete or official form, however. This occurred particularly under the influence and effects of the international negotiations to reform copyright law, which resulted in the Revised Berne Convention of 1928. When it came to photography,

103  This is also noteworthy because the legal distinction between art photography and ‘all other’ photography demanded a hierarchy among different types of photographs. This demand was only cemented legally decades later in the German photography law of 1985, with its distinction between the photographic work (Lichtbildwerk) and the photograph (Lichtbild).

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both these international negotiations and the reform discussions in Germany took a different turn than might have been expected. Instead of voting to institute stronger control mechanisms or to expand the rights of photographers (as, for example, in the droit moral called for by France) in light of the threatened evaporation of the image, no changes whatsoever were made in the legal definition of photography. Between the Art Copyright Act of 1907 and the extension of the duration of copyright in the reformed Act of 1940, there was no legal response to the technical and societal development of photography and its consequences. This striking inaction reflected the uncertainty towards photography. Legislators did not know how to act, and therefore did not act, or quite deliberately failed to act.

The photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries profited in two respects from the actual practices and inadequacies to which the Art Copyright Act and various approaches to reform gave rise. As photographers’ representatives, their responsibility was to administer and verify image copyright. They had to ensure that the manner of use and reproduction of the photos they supplied conformed to the agreements made and that the customers actually abided by them. Because the agencies participated in the sale of pictures by charging a commission and administrative fee, they were naturally anxious that the photos were not used unlawfully and thus in a manner damaging to their reputation. As “publishers” of photographs, and this applied especially to the commercial photo archives, they however profited in any case from the lax application of and contempt for image copyright and the relatively weak position of photographers in a situation of massive competition. Many photographers ceded their works to the agencies and commercial picture libraries for a one-time payment or a monthly income.

The photographers did not know, and presumably were not in the position to care, which photos were chosen, or how – and how often – the agencies and commercial picture libraries used their works. As a rule, the photographers had only limited control over their material. The detailed reconstruction of the development of image copyright for photographs undertaken in this chapter helps to explain the business model of the photo agencies and commercial picture libraries – a business model that developed in relation to image copyright and increasingly held out the promise of success.

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Conclusion: The “age of picture agencies�104 in the late Weimar Republic was marked by the emergence of a plethora of new companies and the growth of existing photographic agencies, both domestically and at the international level; these enterprises offered news photographs and utilitarian pictures to the press and also to the rapidly expanding advertising industry. This development was the result of a variety of factors, each of which had ramifications for the others. The technological advances in cameras and printing techniques and the improvements in film quality were one facet of this development; these innovations increased the mobility of photography and lowered the costs of producing and printing photographs. Another facet was the unprecedented quantity and diversity of distribution channels, above all the rise of new media formats such as the Illustrierte; rather than simply publishing photographs as occasional accompaniments to articles, these magazines structured their content around visual illustrations and advertisements. Commercial advertisements in particular played an essential role in the development of illustrated magazines, as they served not only as a platform for distribution, but also as a vital source of income for publishers and photographers, and by extension for their agents. Accordingly, photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries began to specialize in certain products and markets, which led to their professionalization in terms of the administration and organization of their material.

As the chapter on photography and copyright has described, the dynamization of the picture market during the first decades of the twentieth century created the pressing need to regulate supply and demand between photographers, picture suppliers, and their clients. The modern picture market evolved with the advent of photographic image rights that was gradually taking shape during this period. However, the increased reproducibility, mobility, and ubiquity of mass-produced images also led to a wider debate about the sustainability of copyrights and the very nature of photography. Indeed, it is alongside the establishment of copyright protection that photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries asserted themselves as intermediaries and rights representatives, placing themselves squarely between the production and distribution of images and between the theory and practice of photographic image rights.

104  See note 3, Part I.

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Part II “Making history a slightly profitable thing” – The Bettmann Archive (ca. 1933-1981) Chapter 1 From the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann to the Bettmann Archive 1. Otto Bettmann (1903–1998)

Figure 3: Michael O’Connor, “Portrait of Otto Bettmann with Magnifying Glass.” ca.

1988. In Bettmann, Picture Man, 1992: 3.

I am the Bettmann Archive.1 Reconstructing Otto Bettmann’s persona (Figure 3)2 is crucial to the very understanding of the Bettmann Archive. His family background, education, and professional orientation nourished the business idea, an idea equally shaped and determined by the place, time, and socio-cultural environment in which it emerged: the city of Berlin during the late Weimar Republic.

1

Otto Bettmann, Bettmann: The Picture Man (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 7.

2 The portrait was used for the cover of Bettmann’s autobiography. It is commented by Bettmann as follows: “My favourite pastime: roaming through the Bettmann Portable Archive, a volume that sums up a lifetime of picture research and bookmaking.”

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The primary sources related to Otto Bettmann’s life and the history of the Bettmann Archive are numerous, yet noticeably homogenous in their description. In addition to several newspaper and magazine articles about the Bettmann Archive and its founder published as early as 19363 and carefully collected by Bettmann himself until his death, there exists a detailed interview, which Bettmann granted the American Jewish Committee in the framework of the William E. Wiener Oral History Library project. It was authorized and released, after several modifications, in 1972.4 Otto Bettmann’s autobiography Bettmann: The Picture Man, published in 1992,5 is largely based on this interview, on a number of short profiles, as well as on more indirect forms of image cultivation. The latter includes Bettmann’s own, mainly educational writings, which he continued throughout his career, and the public image of the Bettmann Archive itself, constructed through advertising and other means of promotion. Both the writings and public representation are dependent upon one another, as we will see later.

The difficulty with autobiographical sources in general certainly lies in the critical analysis of the material, in allowing the contrived and biased information to ‘speak’ while at the same time contextualizing this information. It is evident that Bettmann not only propelled, but consciously shaped the historiography of his company through a deliberate and highly calculated verbal and visual rhetoric. Thus, these sources need to be examined as what they are: valuable biographical notes and promotional vocabulary. The myth surrounding the Bettmann Archive and its founder quickly grew into a brand, marking a distinction vis-à-vis its competitors, and developing into a powerful and lasting instrument.

Otto Ludwig Bettmann was born in Leipzig on October 15, 1903 to Charlotte Bettmann, née Frank and Hans Isidor Bettmann. Both part of the intelligentsia of Leipzig, Bettmann’s mother was from a prominent and wealthy Jewish family and his father, a famous orthopaedic surgeon, had his own clinic. Together with his brother Ernst, Otto Bettmann was raised in an educated atmosphere of science, music and literature.

Entering the University of Leipzig in 1923, he pursued history, philosophy, and modern

3 Percy M. Seitlin, “Bettmann’s Index. A Picture History of Civilization,” PM Production Manager Magazine 2, no. 7 (1936).

4 Otto Bettmann, interview recorded for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, New York City, June 12 and June 24, 1971; published in 1972; revised and authorized in 1974.

5

See note 1, Part II.

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literature as major fields of study in both Leipzig and Freiburg, and attended, among others, Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) philosophy classes.6 In 1927, he completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Emergence of Professional Ideals in the German Book Trade of the eighteenth century,”7 an analysis of the impact of the enactment of copyright legislation on the book trade, which, to some extent, inspired his future business model. Shortly thereafter, Bettmann moved to Berlin, the country’s political and cultural centre. Supported by his family, he strived to earn a living from writing,8 but soon returned to the University of Leipzig to earn an additional diploma in library studies.

In 1930, after a brief period of employment at the renowned music publishing house C.F. Peters in Leipzig, and in the midst of the world financial crisis, which seriously affected the German economy, he moved back to Berlin. There he obtained a position as a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek (National Art Library).9 His biographical notes suggest that he was employed in the department of rare books and was responsible for the development of the library’s Hans Grisebach collection of incunabula, graphic prints, and illustrated books from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Since most pre-war documents relating to the internal organisation and personnel of the umbrella organisation Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums), of which the Kunstbibliothek was part, were lost or destroyed during the Second World War,

6 The biographical sources on Otto Bettmann’s fields of study vary considerably. This may be due to the fact that the German higher education system promoted a very broad and multidisciplinary knowledge acquisition.

The faculty of philosophy at Leipzig University, for instance, encompassed philosophy, cultural, economic and social history. The source used here is Otto Bettmann’s résumé handed in alongside his doctoral dissertation: Otto Bettmann, Die Entstehung buchhändlerischer Berufsideale im Deutschland des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (doctoral thesis, Philosophy Department, University of Leipzig, 1927), 119. See also: Donald G. Davis, “Otto Ludwig Bettmann (1903–1998),” in Second Supplement to the Dictionary of American Library Biography, ed. Edward E. Goedeken (Westport: Pub. Libraries, 2003), 29-32. See also Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Röder, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, vol. 2 (München: Saur, 1983), 100.

7 See note 6, Part II (above). The dissertation was directed by Prof. Dr. phil. Alfred Jakob Doren, holding the professorship for economic, social and medieval history, and his colleague Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Goetz, professor for cultural and universal history, see database ”Geschichte der Universität Leipzig,” http://www. uni-leipzig.de/unigeschichte/professorenkatalog/.

8 During this time, Bettmann was hired to write the history of the publishing house Dr. Walter Rothschild, which appeared in 1930. See Otto Bettmann, Staat und Menschheit. Ideengeschichte des Verlags Dr. Walter Rothschild (Berlin: Dr. Walter Rothschild Verlag, 1930).

9 Founded in 1867 as part of the Deutsches Gewerbemuseum (National Museum of Applied Arts and Design), the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek developed into the central reference library for the Royal Museums, today’s Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Access to the library was reserved to scholars and museum employees.

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the actual circumstances of Bettmann’s employment and position cannot be verified.10 The fact, however, that references to different institutions within the Staatliche Museen appeared, with the Kunstbibliothek mentioned alongside the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum for Prints and Drawings),11 suggests that Bettmann was employed either for temporary missions or as an early career trainee, a position responsible for a variety of assignments in a number of institutions within the Staatliche Museen.

10 Considerable parts of the institution’s internal archive, including the employment records were destroyed during Second World War. This largely contributed to the lack of information concerning Otto Bettmann’s employment at the Kunstbibliothek.

11 Today, the Kupferstichkabinett is Germany’s largest graphic arts collection, comprising of more than 500,000 graphic prints and 110,000 drawings. During the 1930s, its collection was preserved and displayed at the Kunstkammer of the Neues Museum.

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2. Otto Bettmann and the Kunstbibliothek It was in this environment – with everyday library and archival work on the one hand, and the unrestrained access to the diverse and abundant collections of the Staatliche Museen on the other – that Bettmann began photographing various types of prints, reproductions of art works, and illustrations from art books with his first camera, a 35-mm Leica.12 This procedure laid the foundation for a loose photographic collection driven by his personal interest in historical illustrations from the fields of medicine, music, and literature. Bettmann himself attributed the idea of using photography for reproducing and collecting images to his childhood pastime of gathering medical illustrations and discarded x-ray photographs from his father’s surgery. While working at the Kunstbibliothek, he conceptualised and proposed an exhibition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s death. Entrusted with this task by his supervisor, the renowned art historian and library director, Curt Glaser,13 Bettmann assembled a thematic exhibition drawn from the library’s collection. The exhibition was rather small and of little prominence within the library’s activities and programme, but it was of crucial importance to its curator. Before the dismantlement of the exhibition, he photographed each book, engraving, and print that had served as an object in the exhibition and kept the photographic negatives.

During the 1920s and 1930s, and in particular under the direction of Curt Glaser, the Kunstbibliothek played a pivotal role in Berlin’s art scene and cultural life.14 With the integration of contemporary photography, Gebrauchsgraphik (graphic design), and Reklamekunst (advertising art) into the library’s collection, and with the organisation of exhibitions and lectures ranging from popular culture and arts and crafts to more canonical art historical themes, the Kunstbibliothek aimed at positioning itself within the contemporary cultural landscape, “providing a forum for the present debate in

12 Bettmann, Picture Man, 26. Alongside the Ermanox camera, the Leica 35mm still camera (Leica I-III), introduced in 1925, with interchangeable lenses and coupled rangefinder for enhanced focusing was renowned for its precision and functionality.

13 Born in 1879 in Leipzig, Curt Glaser, a medical physician, art historian and art collector, was appointed director of the Kunstbibliothek in 1924. Glaser was dismissed from his position in 1933. He emigrated to Switzerland and later arrived in the United States where he died shortly after in 1943.

14 Previously under the aegis of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the Kunstbibliothek became an independent institution within the Staatliche Museen in 1924. See Bernd Evers ed., Die Kunst in der Bibliothek. Zur Geschichte der Kunstbibliothek und ihrer Sammlungen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 20–21.

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Berlin.”15 In this programme, particular attention was paid to photography. In addition to hosting and sponsoring the pioneering Deutscher Werkbund touring exhibition fifo in 1929, as well as numerous monographic exhibitions, the Kunstbibliothek supported contemporary photography by purchasing the works of Florence Henri, Helmar Lerski, László Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and many others.16 During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Kunstbibliothek organized a series of public lectures on contemporary photography and cinematography. The photographer Hugo Erfurt spoke about “Die Entwicklung der Bildnisphotographie” (The Development of Portrait Photography), the graphic designer Paul Renner discussed “Die Photographie in der Werbekunst” (Photography in Advertising Art), and art historian Rudolf Arnheim addressed new media with a lecture on “Mechanische Künste. Von der Kamera zum Mikrofon” (The Mechanical Arts: From Camera to Microphone). Functioning as a link between museums, art historical research, and the general public,17 the Kunstbibliothek provided contemporary photography with an institutional framework and proclaimed its role as an “advocate for modernism and the Neues Sehen (New Vision).”18 Along with this concrete support of photography as a contemporary medium and art form came Glaser’s initiative to forge a photography archive, the Deutsches Bildarchiv (German Picture Archive), modelled on and a complement to the German Documentation Centre for Art History, the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, founded and directed by the art historian Richard Hamann in 1913.

Otto Bettmann’s institutional career ended abruptly: a German Jew, he was dismissed from his position at the library in April 1933 as a consequence of the enforcement of the anti-Semitic “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,”19 one of the first legal measures imposed by the National Socialist regime after its acces-

15 Andreas Stroble, Curt Glaser. Kunsthistoriker – Kunstkritiker – Sammler. Eine Deutsch-jüdische Biographie (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2006), 68.

16 Kühn, “Kunstbibliothek und Neues Sehen,” 9. The Kunstbibliothek’s liberal policy towards popular arts, or the broad definition of artistic practices also manifested itself in its acquisition policy. Following the fifo exhibition of 1929, for example, it purchased several exhibition panels, among them panels on New Typography designed by László Moholy-Nagy.

17 Both directors of the Kunstbibliothek, Peter Jessen and Curt Glaser, repeatedly emphasized the importance of providing the general public with free access to the library’s services and collection. See Stroble, Curt Glaser, 69.

18 Kühn, “Kunstbibliothek und Neues Sehen,” 18.

19 Original German title: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums vom 7. April 1933.

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sion to power.20

20 In Bettmann’s own recount, it was one of his close superiors, Jakob Rosenberg, curator at the Kupferstichkabinett, who informed him of his dismissal. Shortly thereafter, Rosenberg was also removed from the State’s service; he emigrated to the United States in 1935.

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3. Pictorial Research: The Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin Following his dismissal, Bettmann established his own business. Aware of the futility of finding employment under the widely imposed discriminatory laws and motivated by the dynamics of the contemporary picture market, including the creation of numerous photographic agencies, Bettmann sought to transform his collection of photographic reproductions into a commercial venture for the distribution of historic visual imagery: the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin (Figure 4). There is much to be said for the assumption that Bettmann had intended to establish a business based on photographic reproductions earlier, that is to say during his active years at the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett.21

Figure 4: Eduard Sauer, “Business Emblem, Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin.”

Photograph, ca. 1933.

Notwithstanding Bettmann’s efforts, the development of a new business became increasingly difficult for German Jews, as they were denied the obligatory business and tax registration by the authorities. Especially in the press and publishing sector, Jews suffered immediate repressions, soon leading to the Gleichschaltung, the enforced political conformity and streamlining of the press sector. From 1933 onwards, the various news photographers and agency associations were incorporated into a single association, the newly established Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse. Membership in the Reichsverband was mandatory, yet Jews were excluded from it. In addition, the Schriftleitergesetz, adopted in October 1933, banned Jews from any journalistic activity. The Bildarchiv Dr. Otto

21 This is suggested by the annotations on the Bettmann Archive card catalogue as well as the notes provided in the inventories. Both elements will be discussed in chapter II.2.4.

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Bettmann, Berlin was, thus, forced to operate as a semi-official, one-man company. As

a necessary qualification for an agency or picture service company, Bettmann hoped to draw upon his scattered professional and private contacts within the press and publishing business, both in Berlin and Leipzig. However, owing to the severe competition in the picture market, and the worsening political and economic situation, Bettmann’s endeavour at self-employment was destined to fail. Judging from its internal business documentation22 the company sold very few reproductions, too few to break even, let alone being profitable. While receiving continuous financial support from his family, Bettmann was able to publish articles on contemporary graphic design, illustration art, and Buchkunst (book art) in the leading journal on graphic design Gebrauchsgraphik.23 His aspirations and efforts to leave the country became increasingly definite, yet he used the time until his emigration in 1935 to develop a more comprehensive business model and systematically expand his collection. While consisting primarily of visual material from Berlin institutions, Bettmann also surveyed and reproduced material from various other library and museum collections during his frequent travels to Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. In November 1935, the state of uncertainty came to an end, and he emigrated to the United States with the help of American relatives.

With his emigration to New York, Otto Bettmann became one of a small number of German intellectuals of Jewish descent working in the fields of art, culture, and media, who benefited from indispensable private and professional contacts, and who had the financial means for emigration to the United States.24 Alongside Kurt Korff, editor-inchief of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), who directed the launch of the American illustrated magazine Life (first published in 1936), and Korff’s former colleague Kurt Safranski, co-founder of the news picture service Black Star Picture Agency, numerous publishers and photographers such as Hermann Ullstein, Martin Munkácsi, and Alfred Eisenstaedt left Berlin in order to build a new life in New York, the capital of the American press and publishing sector.

22 The internal business documentation is indirectly provided by the card catalogue, which is the subject of chapter II.2.4.

23 The bi-lingual German and English journal Gebrauchsgraphik, published between 1924 and 1971 was defined as a professional journal for the enhancement of advertising art (Gebrauchsgraphik: Monatszeitschrift zur Förderung künstlerischer Werbung). Between 1931 and 1933, Otto Bettmann wrote a couple of short portrayals of contemporary illustrators, such as Oskar Bangemann, Hans A. Müller and Kurt Siebert.

24 Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, Weimar and Now, no. 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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Despite the hardship and financial failure of the Berlin years, the first years of the Bettmann Archive’s existence were defining ones for the conceptualisation and development of its business model. Here, Bettmann set the course for his later success, which in turn, may only have been attainable in its new environment, the United States.

Bettmann developed the prototype of a service company for historic visual imagery during his years in Berlin, in the socio-cultural context of the late Weimar Republic, a service that unfolded fully only after Bettmann’s emigration to New York.

With Bettmann’s emigration to the United States, the ‘official’ narrative of the Bettmann Archive, emerging from “two trunks filled with old pictures,”25 was written. The references relating to the number of imported images differs according to sources; indications vary from 10,000 to 25,000 images.26 Again, with the support of relatives, Bettmann re-established the Bettmann Archive in his apartment in uptown Manhattan soon after his arrival.27 In response to the growing success and expansion of the company, in 1943 the Bettmann Archive relocated to 215 East 57th Street, near the Museum of Modern Art, an area with a high concentration of antiquarians and galleries.

Bettmann shared the premises with his American wife, Anne Gray, an antique dealer and interior designer, whom he had married in 1937. 28 Defined as a service company for historic visual imagery, Bettmann began canvassing publishing houses and advertising agencies and presenting his collection to them. It proved an arduous endeavour given the competition and also the predominant demand for contemporary illustrations and photographs. The turning point according to Bettmann, occurred with the sale of an illustration from the Musurgia Universalis by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, first published in 1650,29 for an advertising campaign for Columbia Broadcasting System 25 Bettmann, Picture Man, 37.

26 The card catalogue, which has been preserved until today, suggests that Bettmann imported approximately 6,000 negatives, prints, and other picture masters to the United States. Yet, more important than the exact number of images, is the fact that Bettmann also took the corresponding card catalogue with him, as it points to the importance and status of the organizational system of the collection.

27 The first business address of the Bettmann Archive was 145 West, 44th Street, New York City.

28 Widowed with three children, Anne Gray was a lifelong adviser to Bettmann. She died in 1988, shortly after their 50th wedding anniversary. In his biographical notes, Bettmann repeatedly mentioned Gray’s American forthrightness and practicality, which complemented his German bookish character. One of Bettmann’s step-sons, Melvin, joined the company in the early 1970s.

29 In the Musurgia Universalis, which is part of Kircher’s Phonurgia Nova, the author explores the history of music and musical genres, dividing them into national styles, social functions, and techniques. Kircher’s book, widely distributed, laid the foundation for the modern classification system of music. See Jocelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 69–71.

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(CBS), which appeared in the February 1938 issue of Fortune Magazine (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Advertisement “We’re not so young” for Columbia Broadcasting System, (doublepage). In Fortune, February 17, 1938.

It is this advertisement that represents the ideal commercial use of historic imagery as conceived by Otto Bettmann, and which, at the same time, appears to be both ingenious and strikingly simple.

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Chapter 2 Creating a Commodity, Creating a Service Through photography, images of all kinds could become part of a new chain of commercial exploitation. Otto Bettmann’s business idea of an image bank consisted of transforming image resources, publicly accessible or purchased, valuable or considered insignificant, into commercial products by their reproduction, rating, indexing, archiving, and marketing. In contrast to the business model of news picture agencies, the enterprise focused on the commercialization of non-current, or non-contemporary images. With the marketing of already existing, accumulated, and archived photographs classified by subject, the Bettmann Archive tied back into the tradition of the postcard trade and photographic illustration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

However, the market targeted by the Bettmann Archive alongside the press and publishing sector was that of advertising, with its immense demand for imagery and new forms of presentation, as outlined in Part I. In Part I and II.1, was argued that the concept of the Bettmann Archive was considerably shaped by the place, time, and socio-cultural context from which it emerged. Yet, what distinguished it from its many, and often stronger competitors was the deliberate and strategic merging of traditional art historical and archival methods with contemporary influences and market tendencies. It is indeed this integration of seemingly disparate approaches that is one of the predominant characteristics of the Bettmann Archive, and which, in turn, determined its business model. Hence, the thesis is that the success of the Bettmann Archive was grounded, to a great extent, in this concept of duality: the Bettmann Archive embodied a bit of ‘everything’ and could, thus, become, or present itself as a bit of ‘everything’ while oscillating between an institutional/academic character and a commercial/pragmatic practice. The present chapter will examine and contextualize these methods and influences and their ramifications on one another.

As the title of this chapter suggests, the prototypical concept that Bettmann formulated in the early years (ca. 1933–1940) was by no means static. Rather, it was subject to continual adjustments and reconfigurations in reaction to the market as well as to contemporary currents and trends. With the rise of the Bettmann Archive, and its periodic bursts of expansion, the many-faceted concept of an ‘ideal’ image archive as

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initially conceived by Bettmann was visibly weakened, simplified, and diluted. The changes can be reconstructed with the help of the still existing archive, especially through the examination of its organization and structure.

The idea of the enhanced mobility and mobilization of images effected by photography becomes evident in the concept of the Bettmann Archive and it surfaces in various forms. Indeed, the idea of mobility and mobilization seems so dominant, that it must be acknowledged as a guiding principle of the Bettmann Archive and a reason for its success. Consequently, this idea resurfaces in the sections on the “Re-Production” (2.1), the “Re-Cycling” of visual material (2.2), the function of the image as a versatile means of illustration and communication (2.3), and finally in the section relating to the archiving and image retrieval system (2.4).

A further element permeating these chapters is Bettmann’s anticipation that, in the context of the picture market, the value of a photograph does not lie solely in the image, but rather is constituted by the service to the image. The value of a photograph or a photographic reproduction is not only determined by what it depicts, i.e., the image content, but by the efforts and labour that surround it and the framework and form, that is given to the image. Therefore, when thinking of a photograph as a product, or commodity, it needs to be understood as a multi-layered and complex object consisting of various elements: the reproduction (i.e., the material basis); the image carrier (print, negative, etc.); the textual information; image rights; and the organization and archiving, as well as its visualization and marketing. Or, to put it more abstractly: through the comprehensive service to the image, an image resource, a reproduction of a reproduction, which may be perceived as immaterial, is given a material ‘body.’

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1. Re-Production With the idea of the re-evaluation and re-use of visual material, an essential ontological feature of photography comes to the fore: photography as a technique of mechanical reproduction.30 The photographic method and genre, which is primarily based on this feature, is reproduction photography, often referred to as microphotography. The task of reproduction photography is to reproduce and replicate not three-dimensional spaces, but two-dimensional surfaces. With photography, image and text masters were reproduced and replicated mechanically, and compared to manual reproduction techniques such as lithography or copper- and wood-engraving, the reproducibility of photography was hailed as quick, simple, and cost-effective. Since William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative-positive process, and in particular after the 1880s, reproduction photography has been a crucial and widely applied function of the medium.

The Bettmann Archive was formed on the principle of the accumulation of visual material and the production of a corpus through the photographic reproduction of images. For Bettmann, reproduction photography was an efficient medium in building a collection of exploitable reproductions: image sources were reproduced and by this transformed into reproducible image masters, again and again. Bettmann found these sources to be in abundant supply: in public libraries and image archives; in out-of-print and antiquarian books, in lavishly illustrated magazines, such as Harper’s Weekly or Illustrated London News, all of which he purchased. Later he was to acquire entire image collections with varying thematic focuses.

During the early years in particular, Bettmann could not have been in a more favourable position to build up his inventory of images. While the holdings of the Kunstbibliothek, as those of most libraries, were primarily reserved for researchers and custodians, he had unrestricted access to what interested him. In contrast to the general public, he could avail himself of the breadth of the Kunstbibliothek collection with its illustrated books, prints and photographs, and could make his reproductions on site. For 30 For a description of the two conceptual and historically distinct processes subsumed under the term “mechanical reproduction,” the automatic production of an image without the intervention of the artist on the one hand, and the reproduction of images on the other, see Lorraine Daston und Peter Galison, “Photography as Science and Art,” in Objectivity, ed. Daston et al., (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2007), 125-138. In the context of this study, the term mostly refers to the ‘automatic’ multiplication of images, which, as the authors point out, not only applies to photography, but also to other printing techniques, such as lithography and engravings.

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him, library holdings represented a rich and a highly convenient source of references, which allowed him to build the initial capital of the Bettmann Archive. In addition to photographing in the Kunstbibliothek whilst still in Germany, Bettmann, both before and after his emigration, photographed in the great museums and libraries of Europe, including the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the National Gallery and the British Library in London, as well as in the Dutch and Swedish National libraries.31 In his early writings, he expressly valued the libraries in his new home country, especially the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Compared with German and most European libraries, which still defined themselves as the guardians of their holdings, American libraries were allowing their books to circulate.32

31 Bettmann, Picture Man, 85.

32 Ibid., 46. Bettmann was indeed enthusiastic about the American system compared to German and European libraries: “In Germany long ago, it was said that librarians deemed themselves „guardians“ of books, fearful of having them actually touched by ordinary human hands.... In the United States, I discovered that the librarians made every effort to get books into circulation. A European newcomer cannot help but be impressed by the prevailing liberality with which books can be checked out: the open shelves mirror the country’s open mind and society.”

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1.1 Reproduction Photography While reproduction photography was already widely established in publishing houses for commercial and documentation purposes during the second half of the nineteenth century, it was introduced in public libraries only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and practiced on a broader scale during the 1930s. In the early years of the Bettmann Archive, the relationship between photography and the library was of particular relevance. The way photography was used in the library context, in the form of reproduction photography or microphotography,33 considerably influenced the enterprise both on the conceptual and practical level.

Photographic studios for the production of photocopies and photographs, which are two distinct techniques, were initially established within the manuscript and rare book departments of libraries. There, reproduction photography replaced the hitherto common practice of manual copying.34 The early forms of reproduction photography, such as the prisma technique or Photostat – photography on paper without negative, which most closely approximates today’s definition of photocopying – were relatively costly and thus rarely used, or used only for the reproduction of individual book pages or 33 Stacy Hand, “Microphotography,” in Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 924–928. Hand argues as follows: “The term has been used to describe two very different processes. According to its etymology, the term microphotography should describe extremely small photographs viewed through a microscope or magnifying lens. Throughout its history, however, the term has been routinely applied to photographs of microscopic subject matter, large enough that they may be viewed unassisted.... The idea of applying microphotography in preserving public records and library catalogues received rare mentions in periodicals as early as 1853.” Hannavy’s encyclopaedia clearly distinguishes microphotography from photomicrography by treating it in two distinct chapters. While photomicrography uses the microscope to photograph a magnified image of microscopic-sized specimens (e.g. algues etc.), microphotography involves taking a photograph of a large object and reducing it to microscopic dimensions for viewing it with the aid of a microscope or projector. This description echoes a contemporary definition proposed by the American Library Association (ALA) and published in its conference proceedings in 1936. ALA defined microphotography as follows: “Photography on a greatly reduced scale (compared to Macrophotography, i.e. reproduction on an enlarged scale, and Photomicrography, the photography of minute objects as magnified by a microscope attached to the camera). Any photograph so small as to require visual aid to discern its features may be called a microphotograph. At present the predominant medium is cellulose film, 35mm wide and thus reducing the typical page to a size roughly measuring 3/4 x 1 inch, or to twice that area (as this is the case with newspapers). Long footages require the economy of smaller images, and perhaps 16mm.” See M. Llewellyn Raney ed., Microphotography for Libraries, Papers presented at the Microphotography Symposium at the 1936 Conference of the American Library Association (Chicago: American Library Association, 1937). In addition to this, it is important to note that the English term “microphotography” or the French term “microphotographie” is equivalent to the German use of “Reproduktionsfotografie,” meaning the reproduction of two-dimensional images. Conversely, the German term “Mikrofotografie” usually refers to photographs made with a microscope with a built-in camera, the latter corresponding to the English term “photomicrography.”

34 Heinrich Schreiber, “Pflicht und Recht der Bibliotheksphotokopie” in Sonderdruck aus Archiv für UrheberFilm und Theaterrecht 7, no. 5 and 6 (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1935): 442–463, here: 443.

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manuscripts. However, the improvement in camera technology and the introduction of fire-resistant celluloid acetate film, or safety film, as a purportedly stable image carrier in the 1920s, marked the beginning of an intense international discussion about the potential and possible uses of reproduction photography for librarianship.35 Even though this discussion had already begun, to some extent, several decades earlier with Paul Otlet’s Répertoire iconographique universel36 (Universal Iconographic Repertoire) launched in 1906 or the idea of a National Photographic Library37 supported by American librarian Melvil Dewey, the increased interest on the part of librarians as well as manufacturing companies for this new business market led to a renewed impetus or rise in reproduction photography. In addition to the expansion of copying activities for scientific use, which were intended to replace the external loan or interlibrary loan of books, reproduction photography was discussed as a medium for the conservation of library holdings on the one hand, and as a potential storage medium on the other hand, alluding to one of the key problems facing libraries: space.

The storage of data on flexible film rolls, which enjoyed increased application in the early 1930s, enabled the reproduction of entire books, magazines, and newspapers.

The use of these films, later known as microfilms, held the promise of a reduction in storage space and the possibility of making available more, or previously inaccessible, material.38 With microphotography, not only individual pages were now reproducible, but entire books: their subsequent visualization through the magnification and de35 The potential of microphotography for libraries and museums was discussed in various publications and symposia at the time, such as the guide “Coordination des bibliothèques. Guide des services nationaux de renseignements du prêt et des échanges internationaux” published by the Institut internationale de cooperation intellectuelle in 1933. This guide provided librarians and researchers with an international comparison of the modalities and fees for photographic reproductions in various National libraries and museums. In addition, the mentioned proceedings of the Microphotography Symposium at the 1936 Conference of ALA, published in 1937, offered a comprehensive report on the reproduction techniques and practices in American libraries and universities. The report was widely distributed among US-American libraries.

36 With the writing of the history of the Internet, there has been a growing interest, or rediscovery, of Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum and the collection of photographic documentation. See, among others, Luce Lebart, “Penser / classer les images. Histoire de l’archivage des photographies et émergence de la documentation iconographique (1888–1906),” in Paul Otlet, fondateur du Mundaneum (1868–1944), Architecte du savoir, artisan de la paix (Bruxelles: Les nouvelles impressions, 2010); W. Boyd Rayward, “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944),” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, no. 4, (1994): 235–250.

37 Unrelated to the International Bureau of Photography and the Photographic Survey in Great Britain, the National Photographic Library was founded by Dr. Henry Mason Baum in 1906 in Washington D.C. It was designed for educational purposes and promoted with the phrase “Its Field is the World, Its Scope is the Universe.”

Yet, the Library’s history and scope remain obscure. In its 1908 bulletin, the Library mentions the possibilities brought about by photographic reproduction on film.

38 Augustus F. Kuhlman, “The Place of Microphotography in Research and Library Work,” Peabody Journal of Education 17. no. 4 (Jan. 1940): 223–235, here: 228.

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velopment of prints or the use of projectors, gave meaning to Oskar Barnack’s famous quotation: “Small negative, great image.”39 From the perspective of libraries, the prospect of the reduction of material and space and the lowering of production costs was immensly appealing and, thus, acted as the catalyst for a series of large-scale, publicly financed reproduction projects for books, manuscripts and museum holdings such as the so-called Project A of the Library of Congress, a large-scale reproduction project of library and museum holdings financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, or the survey on the customer reception of reproduction photography carried out by the New York Public Library.40 The cameras and film formats employed during the 1930s, especially in the United States, which pioneered microphotography in libraries, varied.41 According to the reproduction purpose and institutional strategy, there existed three major camera types, which operated, depending on the design, with 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm roll film.

The first were high performance cameras, such as Eastman Kodak’s Recordak or the Draeger reproduction camera, a camera with a capability of recording approximately 1,000 pages per hour. These were geared towards the reproduction of entire book collections. The second type included smaller and cheaper cameras such as the Minigraph and Photorecord, which were developed specifically for reproduction photography, and differed from the first group in price and output. The third group saw the adaptation or use of 35mm cameras, in particular the Leica camera and other types of small format cameras.42 As Keyes D. Metcalf, the director of the Reference Department of the New York Public Library, and later head of Harvard University Libraries noted, though “not designed with book copying in mind,”43 the Leica camera as well as the projectors produced by the company Leitz, which first appeared on the market in 1924, were seen as

39 Oskar Barnack cited after Erich Stenger, Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera bis zur Leica (Frankfurt am Main: Umschau Verlag, 1949), 65.

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Kuhlman, “The Place of Microphotography in Research and Library Work,” 232–233.

41 Fuelled by the efforts and politics of ALA and the Library of Congress, the United States soon occupied a leading position in the field of reproduction photography. The American pavilion at the 1937 World exhibition in Paris (Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne) presented the latest reproduction- and projection techniques manufactured in the United States.

42 Raney, Microphotography for Libraries, 99–110; in particular the chapter “Standardization. A Panel Discussion.”

43 Ibid., 36.

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important innovations in the context of libraries.44 It was the precision and flexibility of the Leica camera along with its accessories that were highlighted in promotional material at the time, as well as the improvement of negative films, through which the 35mm camera, “systematically and unstoppably, penetrated the area that had previously been considered as an uncontested domain of large format namely, in the scientific realm.”45 In libraries, the small format camera promised not only a reduction of costs and an easier handling,46 but also this camera type and its most prominent example, the Leica, had the advantage of “not being bound to the place of issue so that the library user himself can act as the photographer.”47 And that was precisely what Bettmann did: he photographed by himself.

I remember Time once asking for a picture. […], which I didn’t have in my collection. Undaunted, I packed my portable reproduction setup and rushed out to catch the number 20 bus on Fifty-seventh Street to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. In the reading room I ordered illustrated editions of the novel and photographed what seemed to fill the bill.

Then I rushed back to my office, quickly dried and copied the film, and had the approval pictures ready for Time’s messenger at three o’clock. My “express service” was observed with some amazement by my stepdaughter Beverly, who was then working with me. The next time a similar situation arose and our own resources let us down she suggested with a smile, “Why don’t you run down to our little annex on Fifth Avenue?48 44 The annual meeting of the American Library Association of 1936 focused on microphotography for libraries and was also attended by the leading manufacturers for reproduction techniques, including the German company Ernst Leitz and the American manufacturer Bausch & Lomb. The discussions centred on the latest technical developments with regard to small format cameras and their use for library services.

45 Heinrich Stöckler cited after Erich Stenger, Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera bis zur Leica (Frankfurt am Main: Umschau Verlag, 1949), 64.

46 Otto Pretzl, “Die Leica im Dienste der Handschriftenforschung,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, 49 (1932), 182. Pretzl points out that despite the fact that the Leica was not designed for these purposes, it facilitated the reproduction of manuscripts, and would thus serve humanities studies a great deal. [“In einer Zeit, die geeignet ist jede Unternehmungslust der reinen Geisteswissenschaften zu lähmen, tritt die Leica, ein von der Firma Leitz, Wetzlar konstruierter Kleinfilmapparat, auf den Plan. Zunächst für andere Zwecke bestimmt und auf dem Gebiete der Photographie allgemein eine neue Ära ankündigend, wird sie auch für die Forschung in Bibliotheken und Archiven nicht bloß Ersatz für viel teurere, bisher gebrauchte Apparate, sondern eröffnet auf diesem Gebiete neue Möglichkeiten und Aussichten, indem sie das Photographieren von Handschriften technisch ungemein erleichtert und die Kosten auf ein selbst bei der größten Mittellosigkeit noch erschwingliches Minimum verbilligt.”]

47 Schreiber, “Pflicht und Recht der Bibliotheksphotokopie,” 447. [Original: “Neben den kostspieligen Apparaturen gibt es aber noch Möglichkeiten, weitaus billigere Photographien aus Bibliotheksgut herzustellen, die außerdem den Vorzug haben, nicht an den Ausstellungsort selbst gebunden zu sein, sodass der Bibliotheksbenutzer selbst als Photograph auftreten kann.”]

48

Bettmann, The Picture Man, 84.

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Bettmann used his personal Leica camera, presumably a Leica II model with an automatic focus, in conjunction with copy stands, with which most libraries were equipped.

This apparatus provided a height-adjustable mechanism to which the camera would attach. Lights on either side provided illumination, and at the base was an optional glass surface for securing the original.49 Bettmann photographed individual book pages, magazines, and newspaper clippings. But instead of focusing on the text, his camera was pointed at a detail: the image.

This simple apparatus, which Bettmann later installed in his workplace (Figure 6), allowed even untrained photographers or autodidacts such as Bettmann himself, to reproduce images with relative sharpness through long exposure times and with the help of artificial light. Promoted for its versatility, especially for its use in science and technology, all that was required of the photographer was that he attach the Leica camera to the copy stand, illuminate the masters, focus, and release the shutter.

Figure 6: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann on Office Copy Stand.” Photograph, ca. 1940.

49 For a description of the reproduction apparatus and the accompanying devices, see Stenger, Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera, 63. Stenger marvelled about the qualities of the Leica camera and projectors, which would bring about new possibilities for sciences: [“Die Leica brachte eine Großzahl von Zusatzgeräten, die sie eine Universal-kamera werden ließen und vor allem auch auf dem Gebiet der wissenschaftlichen und technischen Photographie ganz neue Möglichkeiten eröffnet.”] See also the company’s promotional catalogue, Die Leica in Wissenschaft und Technik, published by the optical manufacturer Ernst Leitz, [no author credited] (Wetzlar, 1939).

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As a librarian or trainee in the department of rare books at the Kunstbibliothek, Bettmann was acquainted with this method of reproduction photography. This method allowed for the possibility of producing up to thirty-six images per roll of film, of storing the image content in a highly reduced format, and of enlarging and replicating the material for commercial purposes. Bettmann adopted this methodology but applied it not to text, but rather to visual imagery exclusively. It was the combination of these elements, the ‘traditional’ photographic reproduction of printed text and its unprecedented, quasi-industrial application to imagery that defined the new direction, which the Bettmann Archive took. While most reproduction photography served primarily the reproduction of text pages of books, Bettmann’s interest was directed towards the unnoticed, forgotten, or hidden visual treasures found in various forms of publications, in which they usually played a subordinate or complementary role. Released from their original form and context, these copied book illustrations and prints became autonomous, and, above all, mobile elements that could be put to new uses. This release, or liberation of an image with the help of photography becomes manifest when examining the advertisement for Columbia Broadcasting System mentioned earlier (Figure 1): a barely visible vertical line appears in the right half of the image, marking the gutter of the book, from which the illustration by Athanasius Kircher was reproduced.50 Compared with text, the reproduction of images is far more complex and demands considerable mastery, given that the standards, in terms of quality, vary depending on the ultimate uses of the photographic reproduction. Text copies must, above all, be legible, while reproductions of images require the closest possible representation of the forms, contrasts, and colours of the original, especially if they are meant to be the masters for later reproductions.51 As the early contact sheets and internal records suggest,

50 In his biography, Bettmann mentions that the book Phonurgia Nova by Athanasius Kircher was part of his father’s book collection, which he, partially, brought with him to the United States. There is no further evidence as to whether the book was a rare first edition or a re-edition. See Bettmann, Picture Man, 66.

51 Otto Croy, Reproduktion und Dokumentation (Seebruck: Heering-Verlag, 1962), 12–14. As Croy claims, “a good reproduction aims at transferring reality, as it is and as it appears to us.” [“…was in Wirklichkeit vorhanden ist, wie es ist und wie es in Erscheinung tritt. Die Reproduktion von Bildern…nicht bloß Übermittlerin, sondern Darstellerin mit der Aufgabenstellung peinlich genauer Übersetzung.”]

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Bettmann needed several years of practice in order to create usable reproductions.52 Some negatives were out of focus or blurred, some were either over- or under-exposed; it is, therefore, not unusual to find several negatives of one and the same subject in the archive. However, the problem of the faithful rendition of originals, a problem that was indeed central to the debate about the possibilities and limits of reproduction photography,53 especially in the art historical context,54 was handled in a highly pragmatic way.

First of all, until the 1960s, the Bettmann Archive consisted almost exclusively of black and white reproductions. This is not surprising since most historical book illustrations, lithographs, and photographs were monochromatic. The Bettmann Archive, self-described as a picture service for historic visual imagery, supplied material to the press, and to the publishing and advertising industries: the early demand was predominantly for black and white material. In instances when colour material was needed, clients availed themselves of other suppliers.55 With the rising demand for colour images during the 1960s, however, the Bettmann Archive also increasingly reproduced in colour and purchased colour images for its collection, or in some cases, hand-coloured a selection of particularly popular images. In addition to reproduction quality, the form and quality of masters themselves were also treated in a pragmatic fashion: images were reframed, and from some masters only details were photographed. In the event 52 This is suggested, on the one hand, by Bettmann’s detailed notes, indicating the exposure time for each picture and, on the other by a dedication by a friend of Otto Bettmann in a copy of a Leica manual, a manual for improving on his skills, that Bettmann received for his 35th birthday. The gradual improvement can be traced back to the early contact sheets. While many of the early negatives appear in several versions, some of them are out of focus or either under- or over-exposed, later examples show that only a single exposure was necessary in order to obtain a negative of adequate quality.

53 An indicator for this development is the noticeable increase in the publication of manuals for microphotography during the 1930s and 1940s, in particular with regard to colour reproduction, such as Carl W. Miller, Principles of Photographic Reproduction (New York: Macmillan, 1942) and the mentioned Kuhlman, “The Place of Microphotography in Research and Library Work,” 1940; Proceedings of the conference organised by the Office international de chimie, “L’utilisation du film comme support de la documentation,” Paris, March 31, 1935.

54 Several scholars have dealt with the history of photography as an instrument and repository of art history and its role in the formation of the discipline see Angela Matyssek, Kunstgeschichte als fotografische Praxis. Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2009); chapters by Peter Geimer, Pascal Grenier, Dorthea Peters and Kelley Wilder in Constanza Caraffa ed., Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009); Friedrich Tietjen, Bilder einer Wissenschaft.

Kunstreproduktion und Kunstgeschichte (Doctoral thesis, Institute for Art History, Universität Trier, 2007), http://ubtt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/volltext/2007/417/pdf/diss_ft_cover_web.pdf.

55 Although the colour film was already commercialized by Kodak in 1937 (Kodakchrome), the publishing and advertising industries refrained from using colour photography as a more wide-spread practice for several decades. Until then, the use of colour was almost exclusively used for full-page advertisements and cover pages of magazines.

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of an original, a reproduction master, being lost or damaged a new master was produced from a duplicate. By using a small format camera for reproduction and 35mm roll film negatives as reproduction masters, the Bettmann Archive visibly broke with the standards prevalent among image providers during the 1930s and later. First, this concerned the standards for the reproduction of art works, a major component in the field of reproduction photography.56 Second, with very few exceptions, photographers, especially press photographers, worked with plate and medium format cameras. Prints were produced directly (contact printed), without enlargement, saving both time and effort. Moreover, the image and reproduction quality was manifestly greater when using such cameras.57 Regardless of existing standards, from Bettmann’s perspective, reproduction with the Leica camera and the use of the 35mm roll film had only advantages: images could be reduced and converted into a single format and subsequently enlarged and reproduced again. As small format negatives, these images became independent of the place of their physical location, independent from time and place. And even though celluloid was lesser in quality than the glass plate negative, it was far more resilient than a paper print. Photography’s ability to free images, especially printed images, images on paper, from their original form and context, and to mobilize them, was their economic potential, a potential Bettmann recognized and of which he made ample use.

56 Compared to the glass negative, the quality of celluloid was inferior, a fact that was already discussed at the time. Otto Mente, for example, highlights the advantages of film material consisting in the reduction of size, weight and costs, but also points to the fact that the glass surface was more resistant: [“Gewiss hat dieses Negativmaterial, das in drei verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen auf den Markt kommt, nämlich als Roll, Plan und Packfilm seine Nachteile gegenüber der Platte…. Rollfilme sind nicht unwesentlich billiger als Trockenplatten für das Aufnahmeformat. In Bezug auf das Gewicht und Volumen schneiden Filme bekanntlich besonders günstig ab…. Als Vorteile der Glasplatte gegenüber dem Film führt man zunächst meist an, dass das Glas erheblich indifferenter ist als Zelluloid.“] See Mente, “Über einige Erfahrungen beim Photographieren mit Filmen,” 148.

57 Françoise Denoyelle, La lumière de Paris. Les usages de la photographie, vol. 2 (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997), 56–57.

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1.2 ‘Valueless’ and ‘Value-free’ Images The advantage the Bettmann Archive had over the myriad photographic agencies competing on the German and the American market for topical visual material was decisive: in the context of that time, historic images, and in particular photographic copies, were deemed ‘valueless’ in the economic sense of the word. That these images, extracted and reproduced from publications, were of no monetary value can be explained by the fact that their primary economic use lay within the production of the publication itself.

Through mass publishing, the individual reproduction, now a printed image, lost the value it may once have had. Alongside the reproductions from books, magazines, and newspapers, gleaned from the holdings of public libraries, most of the photographic collections purchased over the course of time were also considered of little economic value and were thus inexpensive: “Give me my fifty bucks and drag it away.”58 This included works by unknown photographers; overwhelmed heirs, wanting to get rid of boxes of old glass-plate negatives; mass produced trade cards and lantern slides bought at antiquarian bookshops or auctions; complete pictorial magazine volumes from the late nineteenth century for less than five dollar, neatly stored (Figure 7) and exploited (Figure 8).59 In some cases, this also included ‘visual treasures,’ purchased inexpensibly such as six volumes of scenic views of the Middle East of the nineteenth century

by French photographer Félix Bonfils. The Bettmann Archive, like other suppliers of non-current photography operating outside the market of art photography,60 benefited enormously from the ignorance towards historic images, in particular the plethora of popular images for visual entertainment. Moreover, compared to lithography and engraving as traditional reproduction techniques, photography was considered as a low quality medium, in particular with regard to the reproduction of art works. As a consequence of this indifference towards photographic imagery, the cost of manufacturing the reproduction masters was exceptionally low. The cost of production was, in essence, reduced to that of the photographic materials, including the negative films and their development, as well as to any possible library fees for reproduction or the onetime costs for the acquisition of a collection of images. Bettmann acknowledged that he 58 Bettmann, Picture Man, 87.

59 Ibid., 77–87.

60 For the history of the art market for photographic prints, see Nathalie Moreau and Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux, “La construction du marché des triages,” Études photographiques 22 (September 2008): 78–99; PierreLin Renié, “De l’imprimerie photographique à la photographie imprimée. Vers une diffusion internationale des images 1850-1880,” Études photographiques 20 (June 2007): 18–33.

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did not hesitate in reselling a purchased collection at auction or to antiquarians once negatives of the selected items had been made, thereby generating additional profit.61

61 Bettmann, Picture Man, 82.

Figure 7: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann With Pictorial Magazine Master Files.”

Photograph, ca. 1960.

Figure 8: Bettmann Archive, Item 350-19, “Thomas L. Luders’ Pedespeed, 1870.”

Clipping from London Illustrated News on cardboard, ca. 1940.

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While there is no extant information on the amounts paid by the Bettmann Archive for diverse image collections, the fees charged by libraries during the 1930s may partly be reconstructed on the basis of the contemporary literature on reproduction photography.

In 1933, the Parisian Institut international de coopération intellectuelle as part of the Société des Nations published a guide for international loans between libraries, in which reproduction fees were listed. The available formats and prices of photocopies varied from one library to another, but were generally inexpensive in support of the public mission and the spirit of cooperation between the libraries. At the Berliner Staatsbibliothek (Berlin State Library), for example, a Photostat or the positive-negative print was priced between 0,35 and 1,10 Reichsmark, whereas at the Library of Congress in Washington these copies cost between twenty-five and forty cents; the fees for a photographic print in the French Bibliothèque Nationale ranged from four to six francs, depending on the format.62 For the library user, the photographic reproduction or épreuve photographique was, in most cases, more advantageous than lengthy interlibrary loans, often involving loan fees. This was primarily true for negatives. Whether photographed by the user, the library staff, or externally contracted companies, the cost of negatives was significantly lower than that of prints. The costs of negatives or the right to photograph with one’s own camera were a fraction of the above-cited prices and sometimes involved a one-time access fee, irrespective of the number of objects photographed. In the event that library users or clients did not do the actual photographing themselves, the library could be commissioned to carry out the work for them, with the negative then given to the client. It was furthermore common practice that the library in question handed the negative over to the users or clients in case they did not photograph by themselves, but commissioned photographs. Thus, one could argue that, for the Bettmann Archive, the reproduction of book and magazine illustrations was not only an uncomplicated, easily facilitated procedure, but that it was, above all, fairly inexpensive. Especially in the early years, the investment in the accumulation of visual material amounted to insignificant sums.

62 Coordination des bibliothèques ed., Guide des services nationaux de renseignements du prêt et des échanges internationaux (Paris: Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, 1933). For a legal history of the library copy, see Monika Dommann, “Papierstau und Informationsfluss: die Normierung der Bibliothekskopie,” Historische Anthropologie 16, no.1 (2008): 31–54.

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With regard to Bettmann’s intention of minimizing the production costs, another aspect played an important, if not decisive role: the majority of historical illustrations were either so-called orphaned works or un-copyrighted images. These value-free images were unattributed, anonymous, and authorless images, or else the images were not (or no longer) protected by any copyright laws then in force. Many of the images reproduced and distributed by the Bettmann Archive were in the public domain, be it images taken from publications or as ‘autonomous’ photographs. Under the terms of public domain, these images were, theoretically speaking, in the possession of all and thus public property. The library holdings and countless private image collections, for the most part valueless or value-free images represented an inexhaustible resource for the Bettmann Archive, one from which endless reproduction masters could be produced at low production costs. In its abundance, it resembled a natural resource, a resource waiting to be unlocked and exploited.63 Fascinated by the richness and profusion of existing images, and by the medium of photography as a reproduction technique, Bettmann appropriated the resource image.

In this context, ‘appropriation’ is to be understood as the act of taking possession of an image through photographic reproduction without the permission or knowledge of the image ‘owner’, and by doing so laying claim to ownership. In the case of images both in the public domain and those protected by copyright, the appropriation through photography was mostly carried out without the explicit consent of the owner of the work, whether it be an institution, community, or an individual, the author or copyright holder of the work.

63 Bettmann, Picture Man, 78. As Bettmann acknowledges: “Perhaps coming fresh to this field enabled me to unlock picture sources yet untapped.”

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1.3 Appropriation Processes With the appropriation of images, the authority of the photographer coincided with the person Otto Bettmann. In striving for cost-efficiency, taking photographs himself or having his staff do it had an obvious advantage: instead of sharing the revenue for the exploitation of images with the respective artist, photographer, or rights owner, all proceeds remained within the company. The potential profit that was made through the exploitation benefited the Bettmann Archive solely. It took on the role of the photographer or producer and, as such, the Bettmann Archive accumulated images through photography. While these images were, in principle, at everyone’s disposal, they were not ‘seen’ by everyone, or not seen for what they could eventually become: a commercial product, a commodity.

The appropriation of visual material revealed itself unmistakably in the form of the release agreement, in this case William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype “The Ladder,” ca. 1843 (Figure 9). Every print, every framed slide, every master sent to a client, was marked on the back with a stamp, declaring the Bettmann Archive to be the owner of the photograph and, by this claim, prohibiting any further or unauthorized use, including resale. “As part of this agreement, it is understood that you show under all reproductions CREDIT LINE: THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE :” the Bettmann Archive insisted on the citation of the company’s name in any use or publication. Consequently, the copyright indication “From the Bettmann Archive” or “Bettmann Archive” usually accompanied the publication of images distributed by the company. This was, indeed, the case with the CBS advertisement. From the very beginning, Otto Bettmann was well aware of the value and the importance of this designation. It was a free and widely circulating publicity and marketing tool for the Bettmann Archive and buttressed the establishment of Bettmann Archive as a trade name.

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Figure 9: Bettmann Archive, Reverse side of item Pg. 9469, “The Ladder. Early Photo

by Fox Talbot, ca. 1843.”

Photograph, ca. 1945.

The significance of hand-written, stamped, or affixed information and notes on the reverse side of photographs has received increased attention in recent scholarship. Encapsulated in the idea of the ‘material turn’ in photographic theory,64 these material traces are recognized as vital sources in reconstructing the history and narrative of a photograph as a “socially salient object.”65 These traces or provide information about the organization within the archive, the provenance of the images or photographs, as well as the functions of photography. One could further argue here that the stamped release agreement or copyright information plays an equally compelling part in the construction of a narrative, as it turns into a constitutive element of the product named

64 For the importance of the reverse side of photographs for the research on provenience and in addition to the already mentioned references on the material turn, see Timm Starl, “Hinter den Bildern. Zur Datierung und Identifizierung von Fotografien der Jahre 1839 bis 1945,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 26, no. 99 (March 2006).

65 Edwards et al., Photographs Objects Histories, 15.

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photography. Through the stamped copyright, the product photography takes on form.

A distinctive feature, this stamp, like a signature, marks the fundamental difference between the reproduction and other potential reproductions. Thus, the master, though an endlessly reproducible reproduction itself, valueless at first, takes on a ‘material’ body beyond the photographic material, negative, emulsion, and paper. The stamped Release Agreement therefore served as the visible expression of the control exerted by the Bettmann Archive on the use of images.

While Bettmann may be characterized as a visionary, his business idea and its implementation appear audacious, especially from today’s legal perspective. Both copyand licensing rights were systematically ignored. This applied not only to the early years and the reproduction of historical illustrations from public collections, but also to the collections incorporated into the Bettmann Archive through purchase. A feature of the Bettmann Archive was that image rights were circumvented or ignored altogether, regardless of the development and the more rigorous implementation of copyright for photography over the course of the twentieth century. This seems all more surprising, at least ironic, as in his dissertation, Bettmann examined the ills of the publising business during the eighteenth century, marked by widespread piracy, the latter resulting in the increased regulation and the formation of a moral code.66 The striking ease with which the Bettmann Archive appropriated images and photographs on the one hand, while persistently disregarding copy- and licensing rights by claiming the full copyright for itself on the other, again refers back to the notion of duality that is characteristic of Bettmann’s approach to his collection and the marketing of it. The appropriation and disregard of copyright laws was a vital and calculated element of the business concept. However, it also refers to the ambivalent status of photography as a medium and the photographs as an object. Following the argument proposed in Part I concerning the general disregard of copyright laws as a wide-spread practice among the commercial image suppliers and publishers during the 1930s, the following quote illuminates the fact that the Bettmann Archive, took substantial advantage of this well-entrenched culture or mentality of appropriation.

66

See note 6, Part II.

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Copies of library material Starting from the copies of library material.

From the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, for example, I brought home an almost complete collection of portraits of France’s great personalities in the arts and literature by simply selecting and having copies made from hundreds of negatives taken by the great French photographer-balloonist Nadar (1820–1910). 67 In the 1930s, libraries began raising concerns with regard to copyright issues, yet, the demand for copies of library material was still relatively low.68 Photographic reproduction was not considered an imminent threat,69 especially given the fact that most libraries were research libraries, limiting the access to researchers and custodians. As Bettmann’s statement mentioned above suggests, the library copy did not only consist in copying text. Photographic collections, such as the Nadar collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Département des Estampes et de la Photographie were traditionally preserved in libraries and were, in principle, reproducible. It is only later and under different terms that photography found its way into museums.70 With most collections, library users were permitted to reproduce holdings or have copies made, provided it was done for private purposes. The issue of copyright was addressed as follows: Within American copyright law, the notion of fair use referred to a comparatively flexible legal interpretation of the reproduced material. A copyright infringement only applied if substantial parts of a work, for instance an entire chapter, were reproduced, not individual pages or details. Similarly, German libraries allowed for reproduction of their collections for private use, assuming that these copies would be used exclusively for research and not commercially exploited.71 According to the contemporaneous German legal commentator, Heinrich Schreiber, no legal disputes

67 Bettmann, Picture Man, 85.

68

Schreiber, “Pflicht und Recht der Bibliotheksphotokopie,” 442–463.

69 Luise von Schwartzkoppen, “Die rechtliche Zulässigkeit der Photokopie im Rechte des Auslandes und nach dem Entwurf zu einem neuen Urheberrechtsgesetz,” in Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 51(1934): 297– 311.

70 Christopher Phillips, for instance, describes the complex history of exhibiting photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York starting in the 1930s, see Christopher Phillips, “The Judgement Seat of Photography,” October, 22 (Autumn, 1982): 27–63.

71 Ibid., 303.

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were registered for the inappropriate use of library copies until the mid-1930s.72 The matter of copyright for library holdings was considered secondary to that of the other arts, such as film, literature, art, etc. Consequently, the Revised Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1928, which aimed at revising the recommendations for the international harmonization of copyright regulations in light of the increasing mechanical reproducibility of art works, did not include the copies of library-held materials as part of its resolutions. The majority of library holdings were considered to be part of the public domain, and as such, there was no explicit regulation under copyright law for copies of library material. The Bettmann Archive would not, however, have been allowed to exploit its photographic reproductions commercially without the consent of the respective library or museum, which usually held and managed the licensing rights for material in their collections. No evidence of such consent exists, and it is more likely that Bettmann simply pretended that he was photographing the library and museum holdings for private or research purposes. It is also plausible that the reproduction of this material remained unnoticed or was given little attention, as it was executed with a small and discreet camera. At the Kunstbibliothek, Bettmann’s former employer, the reproduction of rare books and other library items may well have been part of his duties. In addition, Bettmann’s academic degree certainly facilitated the procedure. An academic, Bettmann would have had access to almost any institutional collection, but more importantly, he would have been permitted to take his own photographs. Bettmann emphasized and cultivated his image as a scientific researcher or ‘independent scholar’ throughout his career, especially after his emigration to the United States and in the course of expanding the Bettmann Archive.

Anonymous photographs In many cases, the appropriation of copyrighted photographs by the Bettmann Archive proved equally uncomplicated. Besides the general disregard for existing copyright regulations, the Bettmann Archive, like all providers of non-current or historical photographs, benefited from the rather low protection scheme established by the German copyright law of 1907. In comparison with other artistic media, the ten years of copyright protection enjoyed by a photograph after its production or publication was relatively short. At the end of this time period the photograph became part of the public 72 Schreiber, “Pflicht und Recht der Bibliotheksphotokopie,” 442-463.

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domain. As a result, the Bettmann Archive was able to reproduce and exploit formerly copyrighted photographs, and also to appropriate countless images from beyond libraries and other institutions. Despite the reforms and amendments, the protection period of ten years, determined by German copyright law, was in vigour until 1940,73 thus allowing for a seemingly unlimited accumulation and repurposing of visual imagery.

From 1935 on, the Bettmann Archive was subject to U.S. copyright law. Although American and European legislation shared similarities in their basic principles,74 they differed in some significant aspects. Generally speaking, these differences were embedded in the fact that most European copyright laws tended to argue from the perspective of the photographer and initial copyright holder, whereas the American copyright law emphasized the economic exploitation. As with most European countries, the American copyright law was subject to numerous changes, especially with regard to the rapid technological development during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The United States Copyright Act of 1909 imposed a general protection period of twentyeight years, extendable for a further twenty-eight years, after the production or publication of an artwork, which included photographs. This scheme was in effect until the United States copyright reform in 1976. However, the protection period only applied to an officially registered work of art, be it fine art, literature, photography, music, architecture, etc. at the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. The registration in the Catalogue of Copyright Entries, consisting of the name of the copyright holder and the year of production, was mandatory.75 The registration did not only concern works produced in the United States, but also foreign production. Moreover, the copyright protection was only granted if an artwork bore a clear indication of its producer, or its copyright holder. In the case of the picture market, however, the multiple circulating prints, or copies of a copy, did not necessarily always indicate the copyright holder. Copyright information often went missing, or was simply dropped, since photographers did not always develop and reproduce their work themselves. Thus, reproductions could circulate without any indication of ownership, and without the photographer’s knowledge 73 In the amendment of 1940, the protection period for copyrighted photographs was extended to a total of twenty-five years. A more profound revision of the copyright law, including photography occurred twenty-five years later, in 1965.

74 The similarities rely in the fact that most Western countries aligned their national legislation to the international guidelines formulated by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, first ratified in 1886.

75 It was only with the 1976 U.S. copyright reform, that this procedure was dropped.

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and permission. Copyright claims were therefore not always traceable or verifiable.In additionto this, in American jurisprudence, the photographer was able to fully transfer his rights, including the copy- and licensing rights to a third party. Consequently, the Bettmann Archive became the copyright holder for most of the photographs and collections it purchased, a common practice in the picture market. As a result, the Bettmann Archive was not only able to control the distribution and the continuous reproduction of images. It was also allowed to crop or alter a photograph and modify the information associated with it without any legal constraints.

With the initial collection of approximately 10,000 images that Bettmann took to the United States in 1935, the lack of information concerning the copyright or the provenance of the images is particularly striking. Yet, this had few consequences, since the relocation of the Bettmann Archive to New York facilitated the casual handling of images from a copyright perspective. Given that the onus of proof of a copyright infringement was and still is on the plaintiff, in the case of the Bettmann Archive, the photographer or copyright holder’s geographical distance from the United States considerably complicated the detection of any infringement and made enforcement almost impossible. “On the other side” – a small, but recurring annotation that can be found on the catalogue cards— suggests that Bettmann was well aware of this geographical distance and its consequences. The likelihood of a copyright claim from a museum, library, photographer, or artist from ‘the other side’ was slight, especially, since the Bettmann Archive explicitly concentrated its operations on the local and national U.S. market until 1981, the year of its sale. The company did not seek out cooperation with foreign partners, nor did it expand its operations beyond the United States as most commercial image providers tended to do. The risk of a potential confrontation with copyright claims was therefore left to chance, in particular with regard to images originating from European collections.

As suggested earlier, the cavalier handling and management of copyright relating to photography as well as the multiple re-use and repurposing of photographic reproductions, was a widely established practice during the 1930s, at the time the Bettmann Archive was founded. This indifference encouraged the accumulation and commercial distribution of non-current, non-contemporary visual material and inevitably buttressed the appropriation of images. If the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin ben-

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efited from this culture of disregard during its early years, it certainly also served in the establishment and expansion of the Bettmann Archive later on.

The practice of the Bettmann Archive suggests that it indeed considered itself as the sole copyright holder. As was shown with the release agreement, it insisted on the mention of the Bettmann Archive as a precondition for its use, replacing the photographer’s or artist’s name.76 Also, further evidence to the appropriation as a strategic device is provided by the filing system and the sales catalogue of the Bettmann Archive, the Bettmann Portable Archive.77 The image captions and the internal organisational system provided virtually no information of an image’s provenance. In the first version of the card template, for instance, while there was a field for the provenance of the reproduced image, with very few exceptions, it remained blank and ultimately disappeared altogether in later templates. Even when reproducing well-known photographs, such as Walker Evans’s “Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia, 1932,” an image filling an entire page in the Bettmann Portable Archive, the name of the photographer was not indicated. In this particular example, the caption was also modified. As part of the thematic category Photography, the reproduced images were treated in a similar fashion (Figure 10). The captions are short and despite the numerous images arranged on the page, only two photographers were identified by name. The names, those of Daguerre and Talbot, do not, however, refer to the photographer as author or artist, but as inventor.

76 Weise, “Pressefotografie V. Probleme zwischen Fotografen und Redaktionen und der Beginn der Bildtelegrafie in Deutschland bis 1914,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 59 (1994): 33–50. The omission or non-indication of the photographer’s name from the copyright and caption was a common practice.

77 Otto Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive (New York: Picture House Press, 1966). Both the archiving system and the Bettmann Portable Archive will be treated separately in chapter II.2.4.

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Figure 10: “Photography Category.” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966: 161.

Despite the progressive affirmation of the photographer’s professional status throughout the twentieth century, especially through the enhanced implementation of copyright legislation, to which the picture market inevitably responded, the Bettmann Archive adhered to its own policy of negating the role of the photographer or artist, and effectively denying any provenance for the images. It was, indeed, part of the concept.

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Apparatus versus Art Unlike many photojournalistic agencies and later forms of what one may call author-agencies78 such as Magnum, or the French agencies Vu and Sygma, the Bettmann Archive did not represent photographers. It ‘represented’ images. What Bettmann valued in photography, above all, was the apparatus and the technological achievement of photographic reproducibility. For him, photography was a copying machine, not an art. However, concerning the debate about copyright and photography – photography as a purely mechanical depictive device versus photography as a result of an artistic process – the standpoint of the Bettmann Archive offered two different interpretations as the method of re-production and appropriation led to an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, the Bettmann Archive ignored the idea of the photographer as author.

Any reference to the name of the photographer or artist or to an image’s provenance is absent from the material. As a result of their photographic reproduction, images were transferred into a single format, into one aggregative form. These photographed images lost their material features and particularities. Their material history – as book illustration or news picture, as element of a photographic collection or of a series of images – faded. On the other hand, the Bettmann Archive, using the existing laws, unequivocally claimed the full image rights for itself. As the Bettmann Archive considered itself as the author or producer of the images it supplied to clients, it claimed the two different rights, both copy- and licensing rights, for itself. In doing so, it capitalized on the interpretative breadth and vagueness of photographic copyright legislation.

Liberalisation and Accessibility As one might expect, the issue of image appropriation was addressed in a different, or more abstract way by Otto Bettmann himself. In an article published in the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians in April 1939, for example, he pleaded for the liberation of “the thousands of images in art books, journals and manuscripts,” which “needed to be

78 By author-agency I mean (mainly photojournalistic) agencies, which have in common that, as a business philosophy and a marketing tool, they put strong emphasis, albeit in varying degrees, on the aesthetic signature and personality of the photographers they represent. Its most famous example Magnum was founded in 1947 as a counter-model to the common business practices and aimed at strengthening the photographers’ rights, especially with regard to the long-term use of their work. For the construction of notion of the author in photography, see Gaëlle Morel, “La figure de l’auteur. L’accueil du photoreporter dans le champ culturel français (1981-1985),” Études Photographiques 13 (July 2003): 35-55; Aurore Deligny, “Viva, une alternative à Magnum,” Études Photographiques 15 (November 2004), 78–103.

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freed and made accessible in a systematic form.” 79 The Bettmann Archive wanted to be understood as a “circulating library of authentic photo-prints,”80 a library of images.

By offering its service as an image bank, it put into practice the exploitation ofimages that libraries and museums were denied given their public mission. As public entities, the latter were to function “not only as banks, but as exchange bureaus for intellectual values.”81 These banks or exchange bureaus were to diseminate knowledge, “allowing the participation of each individual, even those who cannot access the book as a material good” helping to instigate “the creation and being of intellectuality.”82 However, the desirability and potential of distributing photographic reproductions commercially without intermediaries was repeatedly discussed among libraries and especially museums. Curt Glaser, former director of the Kunstbibliothek (and Otto Bettmann’s supervisor during his tenure at the library), for instance, created the Deutsches Bildarchiv in 1930 with a dual approach in mind. Designed to collect and commercialize photographic prints of German monuments, the Deutsches Bildarchiv was modelled upon and intended to complement Foto Marburg. Its aim was to serve scientific research, and, as Glaser envisioned, to commercially distribute its holdings, as “loose plates in portfolios,” or “as an inexpensive alternative, separately, as individual photographs.” This would satisfy the library’s “immediate needs and the postcard businesses would be defeated once and for all.”83 Defining itself as the fusion of two institutional models, the library and the museum, the Kunstbibliothek, thus, sought to distribute photographic reproductions of its holdings and, by doing so, circumventing external companies. Glaser’s initiative failed due to incompatibility between its commercial purposes and public mission, as well as the absence of a functioning sales structure. The Kunstbibliothek lacked the financial means and expertise for creating such structures. For decades, the market for art reproductions had been dominated by 79 Otto Bettmann, “A Picture Index,” Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, April 1939, 535–536.

80

Bettmann Archive ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no.3 (1941), 1.

81 Heinrich Schreiber, “Pflicht und Recht der Bibliotheksphotokopie,” 442–463. [Original: “Als öffentliche Institutionen sind die Bibliotheken, urheberrechtlich gesehen, “nicht nur die Banken, sondern auch die Wechselstuben geistiger Werte.”]

82 Ibid., 442–463. [Original: Der öffentliche Auftrag der Bibliotheken ist die Vermittlung, die “Ermöglichung der Teilnahme jedes einzelnen, auch desjenigen, dem das Buch als materielles Gut nicht erreichbar ist,” um so “das Werden auf dem Gebiet des Geistesleben,” zu fördern.]

83 See Curt Glaser in a letter to Anton Kippenberg of November 23, 1924, cited after Stroble, Curt Glaser, 54.

[Original: “Ob die Tafeln lose in Umschlägen erscheinen oder eventuell billig auch einzeln käuflich sein sollten, womit vor allem den Bedürfnissen an Ort und Stelle gedient wäre und die Ansichtskarten aus dem Felde geschlagen würden, oder ob sie in Heftform herausgegeben werden sollen, wäre eine Nebenfrage.”]

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independent distribution companies, in particular art publishers, who had negotiated the licensing rights with institutions, and specialized in high-quality photographic reproductions. By contrast to museums, which, by definition, were well aware of the value of their holdings, the marketing idea was less present in libraries other than the Kunstbibliothek. Most of them understood themselves as guardians of their collections, rather than of the content of their objects. In addition, the demand (and the market) were minimal, except for the copies of library material. With the distribution of historic visual imagery, consisting primarily of library copies, in particular in its beginnings, the Bettmann Archive developed and implemented a commercial sales structure, that might well have been inspired by Glaser’s unfulfilled vision. However, instead of focusing on the most prominent works, it speculated in a market for the irrelevant and the superfluous, the forgotten and the overlooked yet abundant visual treasures in books, magazines, and newspapers. The idea of availability of and accessibility to visual material was crucial to Bettmann’s endeavour. The Bettmann Archive was designed as a image bank, providing historic visual material in exchange of a fee, and making anonymous and un-copyrighted as well as copyrighted images available for new uses.

Conclusion The creation of the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin and the development of the Bettmann Archive were considerably shaped by the time, the place, and the sociocultural environment from which they emerged. The institutional framework, and in particular Otto Bettmann’s background as both historian and librarian, are essential for the understanding of the Bettmann Archive. The new possibilities offered by microphotography for libraries and the dynamics of the contemporary picture market were the incentives for developing a commercial distribution service. The potential of the small format camera and the 35mm roll film represented an almost ‘ideal’ technique for reproducing masses of images and reproducing them cost-effectively. The inferior, yet steadily improving quality of the negatives was only of secondary concern to Bettmann, especially in the company’s early years. The exploitation of non-current images had the obvious advantage that the costs for reproducing and accumulating vast collections were extremely low, as these images were considered either valueless or common property. With the appropriation of images through photography and the commercial exploitation of photographic reproductions, Bettmann consciously ignored

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existing copyright and licensing rights. Thus, as an agent, the Bettmann Archive did not represent the works of individual photographers, but represented images. Within this concept of an image bank, photography was understood as a medium for storage and standardization. Through photography, images of all kinds were reduced to a single negative format. The material traces, however, the copyright and image provenance disappeared with the reproduction of these images. As standardized objects, the photographs crossed the threshold to a new market: they could be used and reused, again and again. Hence, potential hierarchies of image categories, as established by the art historical canon for example, were dissolved, as the reproduction in the form of 35mm negatives produced raw material. That raw material needed to be shaped and transformed into a product. The liberation of inaccessible or forgotten photographs and images played a crucial role in Bettmann’s concept of the re-use of non-current, historical visual imagery. Yet, the idea of earning money from it was equally inherent to this concept. The Bettmann Archive oscillated between an institutional image and an efficient commercial distribution service, taking advantage of the opposing principles of the public institution and the commercial market, and by extension of the concepts of high and low culture.

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2. Re-Cycling In the previous chapter it was argued that the reproduction of images through photography was the first step in transferring an image to a new chain of commercial exploitation, and the first step in creating a pictorial product. The Bettmann Archive, which did not trade its stock or represent photographers exclusively but instead mostly offered reproductions of pictures that were valueless or value-free as they originated from public collections, faced a significant problem, however, one that essentially affected any provider of non-exclusive visual material: How could one make money with a reproduction that could also be acquired elsewhere, and perhaps at a lower price?

How could a company justify the fee for such a picture? Or putting it differently: How did one reproduction become more valuable than another? While in press photography standard rates for photographs developed as early as 1900,84 (although, as described in Part I, these rates were by no means binding and served more as orientation) establishing a monetary value, that is the exchange value of a reproduction, proved far more complicated in the context of the Bettmann Archive and the commodification of non-exclusive visual material.

The argument followed and further developed here is that Bettmann realized early on that the value of a photographic reproduction consisted not only of its visual content, but also of the services and actions surrounding an image, which went far beyond their reproduction and sale and included the evaluation and selection, the indexing and archiving of images. As a librarian and historian, Bettmann knew exactly where and how to find pictorial resources in libraries, museums, antiquarian bookshops and private collections. More importantly, though, his academic training and growing experience endued him with a precise idea and an astute understanding of the historical or aesthetic relevance of the source materials. This ability allowed him to navigate an endless stream of illustrated publications and collections with the aim of gleaning images that could be expected to have commercial potential. Hence, far more accurate than the description of Otto Bettmann as a preserver or archivist, a notion that will be discussed later on, is the characterization of his approach as that of a picture editor, or ‘image publisher.’ This editorial function applies in principle, as was mentioned

84 Weise, “Pressefotografie IV,” 37–38. Prices for press photographs were established according to the printrun and prize of the publication as well as the format and topicality of the photograph.

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earlier, to all photographic agencies and commercial photo archives, albeit to varying degrees. As agents of the images and photographers they represent, they by no means act passively. Photographic agencies and commercial photo archives have always been far more than mere intermediaries or way stations between the production and distribution of photographs, for they produce the pictures they sell. This becomes especially evident when examining the concept behind the Bettmann Archive.

The present chapter accordingly focuses on studying the selection of images and the concrete services and actions surrounding the picture subjected to photographic reproduction. The first part will be analysing the preconditions for recycling images and the criteria that determined the choice of source material and consequently formed the focus of the Bettmann Archive’s collection until around 1960. The second part will investigate the American picture market, namely the press and advertising as the main distribution channels as well as on the ways the Bettmann Archive tried to position itself within this market environment. Given that the selection of images was, to a large extent, tied to the structure of the classification and archiving system – the criteria determined the structure of the archive, and the structure of the archive determined the criteria – the discussions in this chapter are interrelated with the chapter on the archive and retrieval system.

The recycling of images, especially reproductions of artworks, was based on the idea of a different point of view, one that departed from art historical or canonical methods of pictorial analysis and interpretation. Following the argumentation in chapter II.2.1, this chapter, too, will propose the thesis that, on the one hand, Otto Bettmann made use of certain academic or institutional methods he had been trained in during his studies and his early career. The concept and structure of the Bettmann Archive accordingly show traces of these methods. On the other hand, though, they were reshaped, simplified and combined for the purposes of commercial exploitation. It was precisely the transfer of high culture principles to popular media and advertising and its reverberation that contributed to the success of the enterprise.

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2.1 Subject Eyes: Evaluating the Iconographic Content The primary criterion for selecting sources from among the wealth of available material was their iconographic content, i.e., their potential as “subject pictures.”85 By concentrating on the represented objects, or, as Bettmann referred to it, looking at pictures with “subject eyes,”86 one could identify a number of descriptive and associative keywords, which, in combination with the caption, constituted the picture’s metadata.

Figure 11: Bettmann Archive, Item 22DC, “Cook Buying Meat, Woodcut by Susana von Sandrart.” Photographic print on cardboard, ca. 1935–40 (left); Bettmann Archive, Item A VI/22, “Fleischkaufende Köchin.” Index card, carboard, ca. 1933, (right).

85 Bettmann, “A Picture Index,” 536.

86

Bettmann, Picture Man, 26.

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Bettmann’s method is illustrated by Figure 11: The left side shows a photographic reproduction of a woodcut by the Nuremberg artist Susanna von Sandrart (1658–1716).

Measuring approximately postcard size, the vertical format is affixed to a sheet of cardboard, which, as the stamp suggests, was preserved as a “valuable original.”87 The woodcut, in turn, was a reproduction of the print “Die fleischkaufende Köchin” (The cook buying meat) from the 1689 book “Der kuriose Spiegel” (The Curious Mirror) by Elias Porcelius. As a sort of mise en abyme of several reproductions, the corresponding catalogue card depicted at right, features a miniature photographic reproduction pasted on the upper left.88 In addition to the picture’s caption on the right-hand side of the card, there is a list of handwritten, thematic key words in German and English extracted from the image and inscribed underneath: Fleischerei (butcher shop), scales, Einkauf (shopping), Fleisch (meat), Hund (dog), Laden (shop). The information concerning the artistic quality, the artist or the technical characteristics were secondary for the exploitation of the photographic reproduction or its classification. Such information, where included at all, was merely part of the picture caption. The truly significant textual information, however, revealed itself in the thematic key words, which in turn determined the categories under which the image was to be archived and exploited. As a result, and thus in exchange for artistic-aesthetic qualities, the image opened itself, through a concentration on the depicted objects and themes, to new or different uses, namely the illustration of scales, dogs or shops, etc..

Iconography interrupted The project induced me to take a new look at the world of art. Up to then I had thought in terms of the artist: Gossaert, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Watteau, Picasso. Now I began to see the topical aspect or subject matter of the works themselves. 89

87 As can be seen from Figure 7, the full sentence reads: “Valuable original must be returned.” This suggests that the print on cardboard was handed over to the client for reproduction and returned afterwards. However, the notion of the original is highly problematic here, as it was not the ‘original’ negative of the photographic image itself that circulated. The later was preserved in the collection and served as picture source.

88 As a key element to the archive and retrieval system the index card and the card catalogue of the Bettmann Archive will be discussed in detail in chapter II.2.4.

89 Bettmann, Picture Man, 26.

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As a “picture-librarian,”90 Bettmann traced the act of exploring pictures with subject eyes back to an exhibition he organized in 1931 on the subject of “Reading and Books in Graphics and Painting,”91 displayed on the occasion of the annual day of the book in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin. As the Bettmann quotation cited above suggests, putting together images from different artistic periods and genres from the Kunstbibliothek collection inspired him to look at pictures from the viewpoint of the represented themes and objects. However, what Bettmann propagates in his autobiographical account as the origin of a genuine business idea was by no means new, but rooted in philisophy and iconography as a method of analysing and interpreting images. In his teachings on phenomenology, Edmund Husserl developed the idea of Einklammerung, or époche, the phenomenological reduction. In order to see and understand the very nature of ‘things,’ Husserl pledged for an unbiased, unmediated and unintentional view as a precondition for logic. The principle of subject pictures seems further to rely on modern iconography as an art historical method, as it was proposed by Erwin Panofsky and the Hamburg School.92 In addition to this, Bettmann’s approach may also be traced back to the concept of historical iconography as debated among historians during the late 1920s as well as to specific library methods for the classification of images. Bettmann himself did neither mention iconography and its proponents, nor explicitly refer to other methods in his statements or writings, yet, they are apparent.

In the early 1930s, following Aby Warburg’s work on critical iconology as well as those of Fritz Saxl and Ernst Gombrich, the art historian Erwin Panofsky presented the first systematic scheme of iconography as an art historical method – the branch of art history “which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.”93 In his study of history and art history at the University of Leipzig from 1923 to 1927, it is highly probable that Bettmann (parallel to Husserl’s phenomenology) became acquainted with the teachings of iconography and iconology, 90

Ibid., 23.

91 Ibid., 26.

92 Cheryce Kramer suggests parallel approaches between Bettmann’s practice and iconography as a methodology of art history. However, in contrast to Kramer, I argue that Bettmann had a quite different, contradictory concept of an iconographical analysis in mind. See Cheryce Kramer, “©Bettmann/CORBIS – Techniken der Sichtbarmachung von historischem Bildmaterial,” in Konstruieren, kommunizieren, präsentieren. Bilder von Wissenschaft und Technik, ed. Alexander Gall (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 245–291.

93 Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 26–54, here: 26; first published in 1939. See also Panofsky’s earlier work: Erwin Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst,” Logos XXI (1932): 103–199.

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or that he at least knew about the contemporary debates. The historian of economics and cultural historian Alfred Doren, specialized in Italian Renaissance and one of Bettmann’s teachers and dissertation advisors at Leipzig University, for instance, was a close friend and colleague of Aby Warburg.94 Bettmann’s professional and personal environment yields a further connection. In his autobiography he mentioned a fellow émigré art historian, Julius Held (1905–2002), a friend from his days in Berlin.95 Held was Bettmann’s first connection in New York, and the two men shared an apartment until Bettmann got settled. Like Bettmann, Julius Held had studied at the University of Freiburg and was employed as a trainee at the State Museums in Berlin between 1931 and 1933, working at the Kunstbibliothek as well as the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie under Max Friedländer.96 In the USA, Held established himself as a Rubens and Rembrandt scholar and was soon appointed as professor of art history at Columbia University.97 Held’s research focused particularly on the iconology, social and cultural history of Flemish and Dutch art.98 While it remains unclear whether Held and Bettmann ever discussed the potential of exploiting historical images commercially, it is more than likely that Bettmann had been introduced to iconology and modern iconography not only from his university studies but also from his immediate environment, and used elements for his business model, adapting them to his own purposes.

In contrast to Panofsky’s three-stage scheme consisting of the pre-iconographical description, the iconographical analysis and iconological interpretation, however, one could describe Bettmann’s approach as an interrupted one that ended with the factual apprehension, the simple inventory of the objects and subject matter depicted in the image, that is, with the pre-iconographical description. Yet, its intention was not the basis for a semantic consolidation, contextualization, and interpretation of the image.

Similar to the history of style and aesthetic, the semantic level and iconological inter-

94 In a letter to Aby Warburg for Warburg’s 60th anniversary, Doren speaks highly of their friendship.

[Original: “… einen der größten Aktivposten auf der gewiss nicht armen Habenseite meines Lebens.”], cited after Perdita Ladwig, “Das wirtschaftliche Fundament der Renaissance. Alfred Doren 1869–1934,” in Das Renaissancebild deutscher Historiker 1898–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Forschung, 2004), 34–114, here: 34.

95 Bettmann, Picture Man, 42.

96 Ulrike Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler, vol. 1 (München: Saur, 2009), 284–289.

97 Lee Sorensen, ed., “Held, Julius,” Dictionary of Art Historians, http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/ heldj.htm.

98 Christopher White, “Julius Held (1905–2002),” The Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1200 (2003): 219–220.

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pretation were irrelevant for the commercial exploitation of a reproduced work of art.

Instead, the phenomenological reduction or pre-iconographical perception and inventory of the objects, gestures and events were used to dissect a picture into its motif components and, by extracting key words, put it to other, commercial uses, as was shown in the example of Sandrart’s woodcut “Die fleischkaufende Köchin.” On a more abstract level, the reduction of the picture to its subject matter was heightened by its photographic reproduction as such, since the aesthetic qualities of an artwork and its materiality necessarily retreated into the background with its reduction to a standardized black and white print. The gaze of the spectator was not distracted by the virtuosity of the artistic technique nor influenced by the aesthetics of formal and colour composition. To put it another way: the limitations of photography, and in particular of photographic reproductions of art works, favoured and facilitated a pre-iconographical view on pictures.99 Parallel to the Husserl’s concept of Einklammerung and iconography as methodology of art history, another influence also appears plausible. In the first third of the twentieth century, the potential of visual documents, especially of film and photography, for other academic disciplines, notably history, became increasingly evident. In response to this, the International Iconographic Commission was founded in 1928 at the International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Oslo.100 As one of several special commissions, the founding of this body was rooted in the recognition that “up until now… the material to be found in museums and similar collections has been regarded almost exclusively from the perspective of art history, that is, primarily from an aesthetic standpoint.”101 In light of an increasingly strong tendency towards illustrations in historical publications and the growing importance of the visual in scholarship and teaching, however, the commission called for a firmly historical iconography.102 The aim was to develop historical iconography as a method that in contrast to the discipline of art history would make use of materials in their capacity as historic documents 99 The ‘re-formatting’ and standardization of art works through the photographic reproduction has been evoked, among others, by André Malraux and his concept of the Musée Imaginaire, see André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 123–125.

100 Thanks to Matthias Bruhn for pointing out the existence of the International Iconographic Commission to me. The reference to Bettmann’s practice seems indeed obvious.

101 Sigfrid Steinberg, “Die internationale und die deutsche ikonographische Kommission,” Historische Zeitschrift 144, no. 2 (1931): 287–296.

102 Percy Ernst Schramm, “Über Illustrationen zur mittelalterlichen Kulturgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 137, no. 3 (1928): 425–441, here: 425.

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without regard to their aesthetic value or place in stylistic history.103 Apart from the concrete motivation to “improve the illustration of historical works,” as a discipline, historical iconography was to formulate standards for the “critical assessment of which artistic remnants of the past could be used historically,”104 and thereby contribute to the reconstruction of historical narratives and particularly aid in teaching. In Sigfrid Steinberg’s above-cited report on the emergence and aims of the International Iconographic Commission and its national representations, the author also pointed the potential role of the Leipzig Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte (Institute for Cultural and Universal History) founded in 1909, which possessed “a very fine collection of historical plates and prints of portraits, mainly pertaining to the German history of the Middle Ages.”105 The quality and orientation of this collection as well as the Institute’s cataloguing and archival practice was considered useful in the development and promotion of historical iconography. The fact that the head of the Institute, the historian Walter Goetz (1867–1958), was a member of the Deutsche Ikonographische Kommission (German Iconographic Commission) and editor of the scholarly journal Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, contributed greatly to the realization of this objective.

Although the development of the International Iconographic Commission came to a standstill because its members could not agree on common concepts and definitions, and although this early “visual history”106 project did not assume more concrete form within German history studies at the time, the initiative was nonetheless an expression of a contemporary debate that was doubtless familiar to Bettmann. Thus not only were there connections and mutual interests between the Institute for Cultural and Universal History and the history department of the University of Leipzig, but also because the Institute director, Walter Goetz, was one of Bettmann’s major professors and,

103 Steinberg, “Ikonographische Kommission,” 287–288.

104 Ibid. [Original: Neben der konkreten Motivation der “Besserung der illustrativen Ausstattung geschichtlicher Werke,” sollte die historische Ikonografie als Methode Maßstäbe formulierenzur “kritischen Auswertung des historisch Verwendbaren aus dem Bestande der künstlerisch geformten Überreste der Vergangenheit.”]

105 Ibid., 292. For the history of the Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte see Matthias Middell, Weltgeschichtsschreibung im Zeitalter der Verfachlichung und Professionalisierung. Das Leipziger Institut für Kulturund Universalgeschichte 1890–1990, 3 vol. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2005).

106 For visual history as a research field in history studies, see Gerhard Paul, Visual History. Ein Studienbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006); Jens Jäger and Martin Knauer ed., Bilder als historische Quellen? Dimensionen der Debatten um historische Bildforschung (München: Fink, 2009); Ilsen About and Clément Cheroux, “L’histoire par la photographie,” Études Photographiques 10 (November 2001), 8–33.

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together with Alfred Doren, his dissertation advisor.107 Thus, one needs to ask whether the debate on historical iconography inspired Otto Bettmann to create his enterprise.

Did he see economic potential in the Commission’s call for the re-evaluation of pictorial documents and the supply of adequate historical illustrations for editorial and teaching purposes?

The negation of the pictures’ semantic level and of their cultural, aesthetic or political context took one of Bettmann’s core ideas that was already emphasized earlier still further: the a-historical treatment of images. The photographic reproduction of a picture or work of art and its extraction from its original form erased the picture’s material history. This first step was followed by the a-historical treatment of pictures on the level of viewing, analysis and selection, which was exacerbated by the radical reduction of images to the objects they depicted. It might appear as a contradiction or irony that the Bettmann Archive defined itself as a historical picture archive on the one hand, but on the other supplied pictures whose original context had been extinguished, or was of only limited relevance. Whether “The Cook Buying Meat” was based on the “The Curious Mirror” of Elias Porcelius or was later reproduced as a woodcut by Susanna van Sandrart was eventually of little importance except insofar as these facts served as guarantees of a certain pictorial quality and historical relevance. The provenance of a picture, or the intentions behind its creation, was also ultimately secondary, apart from a ‘historical approximation’. What mattered for the Bettmann Archive was an image’s potential as a subject picture, the creation of timeless pictures reduced to the subject level, which could be used over and over again. A picture, so to say, void of its original meaning and context, but ready to acquire new meanings and news contexts. The ahistorical treatment of images was accordingly not a conceptual weakness but rather the essential precondition for the reuse or recycling of pictures through photography.

107 A reference to this can be found in Bettmann’s dissertation, in which he expresses gratitude to his professors. [Original: “Meine Lehrer waren die Herren Professoren: Brandenburg, Doren, Driesch, Finke, Goetz, Goetze.”]

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2.2 Developing Selection Criteria In the practice of the picture market, however, the iconographic content of an image and its relevance for the present were too imprecise or too broadly defined to be true selection criteria, since any figurative image could essentially be viewed as a subject picture that depicted some kind of object or theme. The expression of one or several subjects was, rather, an initial point of orientation in choosing material for reproduction. According to Bettmann’s account, very few pictures qualified for inclusion in the collection. Additional, more concrete criteria were the good-quality and easy reproducibility of the source picture and the immediate legibility of its content.108 Low contrast images, extremely large formats or damaged works, for example, were ineligible or used only in exceptional cases. The quality of immediate legibility, in turn, corresponded to the general demands made of photography as an illustration medium, especially in the field of advertising, as the following quotation from a 1905 manual on commercial photography elucidates: The print must be clear and the idea to be expressed must be clear. The photo should possess strength, not only as regards the photographic qualities but as regards the expression. It must be bold and impressive and make itself seen. It must almost talk. The idea or ideas to be expressed must present themselves at the first glance. No complication.... Anything in the photo that does not lend itself thus must be left out.109

Bettmann, for his part, applied these criteria, which have been maintained as the standard rhetoric for commercial press and advertising photography ever since, to historical images of all kinds. In order, however, “to make history a useful and slightly profitable thing,”110 the selected images also had to conform to other perhaps more subtle yet important expectations. On the one hand, the selection of pictures had to

108 Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 81.

109 Lewis S. Harvey, “Commercial Photography and Its Adaptation to Modern Advertising,” Western Camera Notes, no. 7 (1905), 181, cited after Sobieszek, Art of Persuasion, 20. “Clear, striking and quickly understood,” is indeed, as Sobieszek points out, a recurring vocabulary when it comes to the criteria for successful press and advertising photographs and one that is perpetuated to this day. It would be beyond the scope of this study to critically investigate the history and the various manifestations of this notion. However, the study of the selection criteria and use of images from the Bettmann Archive clearly challenges this concept as it shows that the criteria were not solely reduced to the content and aesthetics of an image, but also related to the services and image infrastructure.

110 Leslie Hanscom, “A ‘little Bettmann Archive’ for Everyone,” Newsday, November 19 (1978), 32–33.

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be compatible with the cataloguing system that Bettmann had developed parallel to collecting images. On the other, the selection was of necessity orientated towards the market itself or towards the different markets it sought to supply.

Subject Headings for Small Libraries The idea of efficient cataloguing and archiving was of such intrinsic importance to Bettmann’s enterprise as well as to the commodification of images through photography that the present investigation treats this aspect in a separate chapter. The thesis put forward here is that the structures of organization and archiving developed to manage analogue (or digital) picture collections provided a key impetus for the commodification of the image. It is important to emphasize at this juncture that the selection of pictures that shaped the Bettmann Archive step-by-step or image-by-image was orientated towards the Archive’s cataloguing and archiving system, of which the mentioned catalogue card was the starting point. Parallel to Bettmann’s early collecting focus on literature, music and medicine, a basic framework of categories and subcategories emerged based on the list of keywords noted on catalogue cards, according to which the pictures were catalogued and classified. The formation of this framework and the selection of pictures were mutually influencing. Pictures were chosen according to the existing categories, while the selection of pictures led to the development of new categories.

A handbook for librarians much used in professional circles served as a tool for setting up an efficient English-language subject catalogue and as orientation in matters of indexing: the “List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries”111 by the American bibliographer Minnie Earl Sears (1873–1933), which was first published in 1923. An edition of this book was also in the papers of the Bettmann Archive.112 In order to meet the needs of small libraries in particular, Sears had developed an alternative to or simplification of the widely employed Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) catalogue. Sears’s manual provided a less detailed list of subject keywords than the Library of Congress.

In addition, her manual also contained instructions for the consistent development of keywords tailored to the individual library and their integration into the existing basic 111 Minnie Earl Sears, List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1923).

112 It was the fifth edition of Searl’s handbook published in 1944 that Otto Bettmann worked with. The book is preserved at the Corbis film preservation facility, alongside various other uncatalogued items.

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framework. Using an excerpt from this publication – from Bettmann’s own copy – it is possible to extrapolate the manual’s function for the Bettmann Archive:

Figure 12: Minnie Earl Sears, List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries, 1944: 373.

Detail with handwritten annotations, ca. 1944.

Let us take the example of the section on photography (Figure 12): filling slightly more than one page, the list of subject headings for photography covers terms concerning the technical aspects of photography, different types of cameras, photographic processes and genres such as Apparatus and supplies; Photography, color; Telephotography; Photography, aerial; Photography of animals; Photography of birds, etc. Bettmann marked those keywords he wished to adopt for the organizational structure of the Bettmann Archive collection. But this was only a starting point. He also supplemented this existing librarian’s thesaurus with additional themes or keywords, neatly written and placed next to the selected subject headings. While photographic genres were of

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little interest for the Bettmann Archive, the photographic processes, applications and historical predecessors of the medium were expanded to include the Archive’s own categories including Photomontage; X-Rays; Stereoscope; Caricature+Cartoons; Before Photography; Early Prints, or Moving Pictures. Sears’s manual accordingly served as an aid to setting up and developing the Bettmann Archive’s collection and in turn reflected and documented the existing picture collections and motifs that the Bettmann Archive distributed. As was illustrated with regard to reproduction photography, Bettmann applied a method that originated in library science – in this case, the classification of books by subject – to pictures.

Finally, the demand itself was an important factor in the selection of pictures. As the Bettmann Archive developed and grew more successful, it became increasingly clear which subjects sold well. The saleable subjects in turn influenced the expansion and orientation of the areas of collection. The Bettmann Archive’s subject categories thus reflected the demand and, as it were, the sum of the images that had been sold in the past. And as the modifications of the list of keywords demonstrated, the collection and its system of classification were by no means static, but were adapted to customer interests and anticipated requests. The essentially library-based subject categories used by the Bettmann Archive were a dynamic and above all flexible grid of themes that changed with the evolution of the market and the development of the company over the years.

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2.3. “We need specialists:” the American Picture Market and the Bettmann Archive

In order to understand the shifts within the collecting areas from the original orientation to the development of the Bettmann Archive during the first twenty years of its existence, it is necessary – as a supplement to the discussion in chapter I.1.3 – to examine the structures of the American picture market and describe how the Bettmann Archive adapted to it. Following the classic distribution channels of the picture market, the Archive’s offerings can be divided into two basic types, namely pictures for magazines, newspapers and books, and pictures for commercial advertising.

By the early twentieth century, the picture market, especially the trade in press photographs as a complementary element of news transfer, was already increasingly orientated towards (western) global structures. The situation in the USA can accordingly be regarded as a mirror image of the European market, although the market volume in the USA tended to be higher than in European countries. Thus the American market, in which the Bettmann Archive had to re-position and re-invent itself, followed, on the formal level, a similar logic as the market for photographs that had established itself in Berlin and other European cities. The distribution of photographs and the accompanying establishment of new photographic agencies developed in proportion to the multiplication of distribution channels in the press, publishing and advertising.

With the establishment of the half-tone print in combination with the high-speed rotary press in the early twentieth century, illustrated supplements became a fixed feature of American newspapers, especially their weekend editions. In 1914 the New York Times introduced a Sunday supplement illustrated with drawings and photographs to a very positive response; by 1918, 47 national newspapers published an illustrated supplement, and by 1925 the figure had doubled.113 The British model of the tabloid press – cheap, entertaining newspapers like the Daily Mirror, which were dominated by prints and photographs and should be viewed within the tradition of the nineteenth-century pictorial magazines – was introduced with some delay in the USA in 1919, when the owners of the Chicago Tribune launched the New York Illustrated Daily News. The Illus-

113 Willard G. Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism, [1927], 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 389–390.

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trated Daily News, which reached a circulation of one million in 1925, was followed by a number of similar New York-based publications like the New York Journal American, Daily Mirror and Evening Graphic, as well as tabloids in other cities such as the Los Angeles Illustrated News and the San Francisco Illustrated Herald.

The phase of the drastic expansion of the newspaper market, which historians locate between 1890 and 1925,114 was followed by a phase of concentration, cartelization and syndication in the American newspaper industry. Monopolists such as Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher William Randolph Hearst or the magazine publisher Henry Robinson Luce dictated the news and picture market. In the mid-1930s, Hearst’s empire encompassed twenty-eight dailies and seventeen weeklies as well as a number of illustrated magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar.115 The company Time Incorporated116 founded by Luce competed with the highest-circulation nationally distributed magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, Time, Fortune and Life. In contrast to the magazine format, which diversified during this period to cover a wider range of themes, the field of daily and weekly newspapers underwent an opposite development beginning around 1900. Many independent regional and local papers either ceased publication or were incorporated into larger structures, and newspapers became big business. This process of cartelization in publishing as well as the growth of syndication led to the expansion of correspondent bureaus and the internationalization of news, but also to a certain standardization of content.117 Under the impact of the economic situation, in particular the international economic crisis, and but also profiting from the expansion of advertising in the print media, the American market for newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines, the main media and channels of diffusion for pictures, underwent massive changes beginning in the early 1920s. Print runs and geographical distribution grew, new magazines were founded, and established periodicals expanded their market shares. The majority of magazines and journals, which were sold by subscription, targeted a small and generally very specific audience. The most influential and financially successful among 114 Ibid.

115 David Welky, Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 18.

116 James L. Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of American News Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

117 Bleyer, Main Currents, 389–390.

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them in the field of entertainment, in terms of their circulation and wide readership, were the Saturday Evening Post (founded in 1821), Time (1923), Reader’s Digest (1922), Life (1936) and Collier’s (1888) as well as a number of magazines such as Vogue (1892), Cosmopolitan (1886) and Ladies’ Home Journal (1883) that explicitly targeted a female readership. In 1929 the weekly Saturday Evening Post reached a circulation of nearly three million. As became clear from the case of the German illustrated magazines, the print run of the Saturday Evening Post and other established magazines fell only slightly even during and after the Depression, which reflects the viability of the format.

Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photograph “Newsstand,” produced in the framework of a federally funded documentation of New York,118 illustrates the wealth of periodical offerings presented to contemporaries. This motif can be found quite often in American and European photography of the time as a trope of early twentieth-century consumer culture and its “mentality of externalising,” namely of representing mass produced images in urban settings (Figure 13).119

Figure 13: Berenice Abbott, “Newsstand.” Photograph, 1935.

Europeans critics commented on developments in the American press, photography and their uses with both admiration and scepticism, as an excerpt from the published travel account Amerika baut auf! by Curt Glaser, director of the Berlin Kunstbibliothek suggests:

118 Abbott‘s 1935–1939 project on the streets and architecture of New York was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 1937 and published as a book, entitled Changing New York in 1939.

119 For display strategies during Weimar Consumerism, see Janet Ward Lungstrum, “The Display Window.

Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism,” New German Critique no. 76 (1999): 115–160, here: 122. Ward’s analysis of display strategies in the Weimar era seems perfectly applicable to the American case.

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It would be easy to prove that… photography in general plays an even greater role in American life than it does in present-day Europe. At any rate the bulk of the illustrated supplements corresponds to the size of the newspapers, and one can appreciate the comparison with Europe when one knows that in order to transport the Sunday issues of a few of the usual daily papers one needs not a suitably capacious coat pocket, but a sturdy handcart.120

And Glaser continues: One finds sophistication, in contrast, in a number of the best illustrated magazines that can afford to employ photographers of note, and particularly in the advertising, where no expense is spared in the belief that only the best is good enough. If artistically superior advertising exists at all in America, it uses not pictures but photographs.121 As the most important medium for contemporary advertising, the expansion of the magazine and newspaper market during the 1920s directly influenced the evolution of the advertising industry, a relationship already elucidated earlier. In the words of the historian David M. Potter, one cannot overestimate advertising as a cultural phenomenon: “Advertising created modern American radio and television, transformed the modern newspaper, evoked the modern slick periodicals, and remains the vital essence of each of them.”122 Advertising functioned not just as an accessory or financial foundation, but was the actual motor and creative factor behind the development of the new media, a development that consequently cannot be understood without the history of 120 Curt Glaser, Amerika baut auf! (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932), in particular 118–124. [Original: “Es dürfte leicht fallen, zu beweisen, dass... die Photographie überhaupt auch im amerikanischen Leben eine noch größere Rolle spielt als im heutigen Europa. Immerhin entspricht der Umfang der illustrierten Beilagen dem Umfange der Zeitungen, und man ermisst, was das im Vergleich mit Europa bedeutet, wenn man weiß, dass zur Beförderung der Sonntagsnummern von ein paar der üblichen Tagesblätter nicht eine genügend weite Rocktasche, sondern ein stabiler Handwagen notwendig ist.”]

121 Ibid., 118–124. [Original: “Anspruchvoll dagegen ist eine Reihe der besten illustrierten Zeitschriften, die es sich leisten können, Photographen von Rang zu beschäftigen, und anspruchsvoll ist vor allem die Reklame, die es sich etwas kosten lassen kann, und die der Meinung ist, das für ihre Zwecke das beste gerade gut genug sei. Gibt es überhaupt eine künstlerisch hochwertige Reklame in Amerika, so ist nicht die bildmäßige, sondern die photographische Anzeige.”]

122 David M. Potter, People of Plenty. Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) cited after Robert Westbrook, “Consuming Images,” Reviews in American History 16, no.

1 (March 1988): 85–92, here: 86. Potter further elaborates on this thought: “It is as impossible to understand a modern popular writer without understanding advertising as it would be to understand a medieval troubadour without understand the cult of chivalry, or a nineteenth-century revivalist without understanding evangelical religion.” in Potter, People of Plenty, 167. Potter’s consequent approach of conceptualizing media via advertising is essential here, and one that could also be applied to today’s new media, since advertising is not only financing the Internet, but is also deeply shaping its functioning and aesthetics.

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advertising. The 1920s in particular were the years in which advertising matured into a commanding cultural presence. As was shown for German magazines, the number and size of advertising pages was constantly growing. In his study of the development of print advertising, the advertising and economic historian Richard W. Pollay concluded that while before the 1920s advertisements in the USA were limited to half-, quarter- or eighth-page size, in the years that followed an average of forty-two per cent of American magazine advertisements were full-page, with a clear upward trend.123 The history of the aesthetics and economics of advertising, a “billion dollar institution,”124 certainly deserves more attention than it has received thus far from visual and cultural studies or than can be devoted to it in the framework of the present study. Building on the work of Roland Marchand125 and Robert Sobieszek126 and the discussion in Part I, however, let us recapitulate the most important aspects in regard to photography: first, advertising acted as a catalyst for the development and growth of the picture market; and second, photography became a permanent fixture in the visual design media of advertising, alongside drawn and frequently colour illustrations.

Similar to the German illustrated magazines, the use of photography in advertising in the American print media grew continually and in proportion to the development of periodical publishing. By the 1930s, around sixty per cent of advertising in the large magazines with a national circulation such as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look or Ladies Home Journal used photos.127 The radical rise of photography in American advertising was rooted on the one hand in photography’s promise of credibility and on the other in the fact that photographs were usually cheaper to produce and print than hand-drawn colour illustrations, as the manual work was cut out, an argument that proved especially compelling with the Depression and cuts in advertising budgets.128 The exponential growth of the advertising industry went hand-in-hand with its professionalization. Aware of its expanding power, the industry, or the individual adman, achieved new social prestige and developed increasingly precise and varied methods 123 Richard W. Pollay, “The Subsiding Sizzle: A Descriptive History of Print Advertising, 1900–1980,” The Journal of Marketing 49, no. 3. (Summer, 1985): 24–37, here: 28.

124 Colston E. Warne, “Present-Day Advertising. The Consumers’ Viewpoint,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 173 (May 1934): 70–79.

125 See note 20, Part I. 126

See note 10, Part I.

127 Pollay, “The Subsiding Sizzle,” 28.

128

Ibid., 31.

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of using text and image. More and more, advertising, which was always seeking new means of presentation, left behind the simple promotion of products and moved towards a more subtle and indirect promotion by suggesting a mood or way of life connected with the product. Thus advertisements, as Marchand aptly puts it, “increasingly gave predominant attention to the consumer rather than the product.”129 This last circumstance meant that the image, whether a photograph or a hand-drawn illustration, could be placed in association to the object, it could function metaphorically and thereby opening up previously unheard of creative freedoms. Marchand summarizes the developments of the 1920s and 1930s as follows: “American advertising took on a new scope and maturity during these years [when] the number of advertisements, the variety of the products advertised, and the media available to advertising expand[ed] dramatically.”130

Photographic agencies and commercial photo archives in the USA The protagonists on the American picture market included the large picture agencies such as the Keystone View Company or Underwood & Underwood,131 which had been founded in the late nineteenth century and sought to adapt their offerings to altered demand, from stereographs to news images, as well as the picture distribution systems attached to news agencies and publishing companies. The latter applied to companies such as Associated Press News Photos, founded in 1927, the Wide World Photo Syndicate or International News Photos, subsidiaries of William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service, as well as ACME News Pictures, which was founded in 1922 and belonged to the Scripps Howard group, which also owned the United Press Association news agency.132 As a counterpart to the processes of concentration evident in the print media, these large agencies dominated major segments of the market and competed 129 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 21.

130 Ibid.

131 Keystone View Company was established in 1892, Underwood & Underwood in 1881. The latter was founded by Elmer and Bert Elias Underwood, and was, together with Keystone, the leading distributor of stereoscopic views, developing and dominating the international market for stereos for decades. Around 1900, Underwood & Underwood produced 25,000 stereographs per day, often marketed in thematic boxes, and sold approximately 300,000 stereoscopic viewing devices. By 1910 the company shifted towards news photography, but ceased business in the late 1940s. The collections got dispersed and integrated into various agency collections (including Keystone, and the Bettmann Archive) and institutional collections.

132 “The Press. Picture Battle,” Time Magazine, September 24, 1934, [no author credited], html://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754452,00.html. In 1953, the news agency United Press Association formed a branch for the distribution of press photography, United Press International, known as UPI news pictures.

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above all for the nationwide distribution of news pictures.

Spurred on by the expansion of marketing opportunities, a plethora of smaller agencies and individuals existed alongside these major enterprises serving the national and international press and advertising market. The former specialized in a particular thematic area or photographic genre, and either established their own distribution structures or supplied larger agencies. The many manuals published and circulated in the 1920s and 1930s with such programmatic titles as Cash from your Camera,”133 “Photography as a Business,134 Fifty Dollars a Week with Car and Camera; Being an Account of a Delightful Out-of-Doors Occupation for the Photographer with his Camera135 or Commercial Photography. A Practical Handbook136 may serve as seismographs of the flexibility of the market and its general accessibility and openness to amateur photographers seeking an income from photography.

Attempts by media and publishing workers, graphic artists and photographers who had emigrated from Germany and elsewhere in Europe to re-establish themselves in their professions were no easy undertaking given the fierce competition and entrenched structures, especially since the effects of the Depression in the form of high unemployment and a reluctance to invest were still very much in evidence. If scholarship in cultural history points to the varied effects of émigré culture, which introduced European Modernism in the fields of art, architecture and design and influenced parts of American culture in the decades that followed,137 this also applied to photographic agencies and commercial photo archives, as well as to the print media, publishing and the advertising industry more generally. Networking and collaboration were important foundations for operating in exile. Apart from key prerequisites such as an individual’s language skills and financial situation, professional and personal connections with potential employers helped émigrés to get started professionally and socially. In New 133 Henry Rossiter Synder, Cash From Your Camera; How to Make and Sell Photographic Prints, with a Market List (Boston: American Photographic Publishing Company, 1929).

134 Arthur G. Willis, Photography as a Business (London, New York: Pitman & Sons, 1928).

135 Henry Rossiter Synder, Fifty Dollars a Week with Car and Camera; Being an Account of a Delightful Out-ofdoors Occupation for the Photographer with his Camera (New York: Rossiter Synder Publishing Company, 1936).

136 David Charles, Commercial Photography; a Practical Handbook Explaining Modern Methods and Appliances for the Production of High-Grade Commercial Photographs (London, New York: Pitman & Sons, 1933).

137 For the influence of European émigrés on American industrial design, see Julie Jones, “L’avant-garde européene au service du capitalisme,” Etudes Photographiques 24 (November 2009): 42–71; Lorraine Ferguson and Douglass Scott Source, “A Time Line of American Typography,” Design Quarterly 148 (1990): 23–54.

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York, a loose network of contacts emerged among former colleagues who had previously worked in Berlin or other German cities. These contacts, as well as contacts to American colleagues, were virtually indispensable for professional reintegration. The latter resulted among other things from the fact that transnational relations and cooperation between the USA and Europe had already existed for some time. Beginning in the mid-1920s, large American picture agencies such as Keystone, Underwood & Underwood, Associated Press News Photos, International News Photo or Wide World Photo Syndicate set up branch offices in Berlin and other European cities for the import and export of photos. The co-operation between Berlin photographers and agencies and American, British and French agencies was well established. Between 1928 and 1933, for instance, the Berlin photographer Erich Salomon published more than eighty picture stories in foreign newspapers and magazines.138 Kurt Korff, the former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung who was later responsible for reconceptualizing the American picture magazine Life or his former colleague Kurt Safranski are successful examples of reintegration into the picture market. Together with Ernest Mayer, former head of the Berlin photographic agency Mauritius and Kurt Kornfeld, Safranski founded the New York agency Black Star Picture Agency in 1936.139 Safranski, former managing director of the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin, also maintained good contacts in European publishing and journalism. Black Star brought together respected German and European photographers such as Fritz Goro, Andreas Feininger, Philippe Halsman, Walter Sanders, Herbert Gehr, Fritz Henle and Ralph Crane and became an exclusive source for Life magazine, whose first issue appeared in 1936. Some of the Black Star photographers later became regular staff members at Life.140 Life was the agency’s most important customer, particularly in the early years. The magazine’s publisher, Time Incorporated, funded Black Star with a yearly fee of $ 5,000 in order to secure agency photographs for its other publications as well.141 Another New Yorkbased agency, Pix Publishing, followed a similar path of relying on a European or Ger-

138 Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie I. Die Anfänge in Deutschland, ausgehend von einer Kritik bisheriger Forschungsansätze,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 9, no. 31 (1989): 15–40.

One of the most prominent photographer around 1930, Erich Salomon, published 250 photo reportages in German magazines and another 80 in international publications between 1928 and 1933.

139 Zoe C. Smith, The History of Black Star Picture Agency: Life‘s European Connection (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Gainesville, Florida, August 7, 1984). Large parts of the Black Star collection are preserved at Ryerson University in Montréal, Canada. See “Black Star collection Ryerson University,” http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/collection/.

140 Smith, The History of Black Star Picture Agency, 2.

141 Ibid., 10.

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man émigré network. Pix Publishing was founded in November 1935 by Leon Daniel and Celia Kutschuk,142 both of whom had worked as picture editors at the Associated Press Berlin bureau, as well as the photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt and Georg Karger.

Their main customers were also Life and Sports Illustrated.

In comparison to the European picture market and the aesthetic developments in photography, historians often characterize the American market as a leader in terms of market volume, but homogeneous on the level of aesthetics and content. A contemporary critic, Curt Glaser commented as follows on the ubiquity of photography and in particular American amateur photography: It would be wrong, however, to claim that the quality of these mass-produced photographs is influenced by the high standard of [American] photography overall. On the contrary, the quality of this everyday commodity is lower than it is here. It is in keeping with the Eastman-Kodak motto: anybody can do it.143 The most important illustrated magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Vogue and Collier’s attained large circulations, and thus used substantial quantities of this “everyday commodity,” but the German illustrated magazines of the Weimar Republic were considered far more innovative in their variety, visuality and design than contemporary American magazines.144 Or as the American graphic design critic Steven Heller argues: “The United States was resolutely and unapologetically capitalist and advertising was the foremost means of influencing the consumer. Commercialism was far more advanced here than in Europe yet our marketing strategies were much more conventional and word-based.”145 This aesthetic and conceptual difference chiefly ben-

142 Leon Daniel started his career as a picture editor for the Associated Press office in Berlin. He was cofounder of Pix Publishing in New York. An independent agency mainly supplying photographs to magazines and newspapers, was dissolved in 1969. See “Orbituary Leon Daniel,” New York Times, December 31, 1974.

143 Curt Glaser, Amerika baut auf!, 118–124. [Original: “Es wäre aber zu abwegig, zu behaupten, dass die Qualität dieser massenweise reproduzierten Photographien durch den hohen Standard der [amerikanischen] Lichtbildkunst im Ganzen beeinflusst würde. Die Qualität dieser Gebrauchsware ist im Gegenteil eher geringer als bei uns. Sie entspricht dem Motto des Eastman-Kodaks: jeder kann es.”]

144 For comparative studies on the history of European versus American journalism see, among others, Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

1992); David Reed, The popular magazines in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), in particular: 103–194.

145 Steven Heller, “Advertising Arts: Advertising Becomes Modern(istic),” Typotheque, http://www.typotheque.com/articles/advertising_arts_america_becomes_modernistic.

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efited European emigrants, since it opened up a certain space for new ideas, or for the transfer of ideas and pictorial products, in a business that was always looking for fresh impulses. The use of pictures as ‘visual language’ in particular, the New Typography and New Vision movement and the genre of the social and political photo reportage, or picture story, as it emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were considered fields in which the USA still had room for creative and economic development.

The importation of the European avant-garde into American journalism, publishing and advertising, however, already began, to some extent, before the forced emigration of 1933, that is in the late 1920s, as was suggested above. One prominent example is the long-time art director of American magazines, notably Vogue and Vanity Fair, Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha146 (1896–1978), who in 1929 was transferred from his position as art director at German Vogue to the New York headquarters of publishing house Condé Nast with the aim of renewing and modernizing the concept and appearance of the publisher’s American magazines.147 Black Star co-founder Kurt Safranski, too, tested the waters of the American market prior to his emigration during several business trips he took to New York around 1930. Inspired by his experiences there, he encouraged a number of colleagues, including Ernest Mayer, to emigrate to the USA instead of England, the path taken by Stefan Lorant, for example, the former picture editor of the Münchner Illustrierte. Korff, Safranski and others were convinced or at least hopeful that the time had come for the development of illustrated magazines on the German or European model, especially for the introduction and adaptation of the photo reportage as a genre. Mayer noted in retrospect, If we had come five years before, we [Black Star] wouldn’t have had the possibility to exist. The new ideas wouldn’t have developed. It was just the right moment.... I thought there would be much wider possibilities of working, a much more open market, much newer field...I saw, and I am sure Safranski saw, that there was a wide field to work in a big chance to develop the business quickly and create something worthwhile, not just to make money.148 146 Mehemed Fehmy Agha (1896–1978) was born in the Ukraine of Turkish parents and worked as an art director for the German Vogue in Berlin before being appointed art director at Condé Nast, overseeing the visual concepts of a numerous Condé Nast magazines.

147 David Raizman, History of Modern Design. Graphics and Products Since the Industrial Revolution (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2003), 229–232.

148 Smith, The History of Black Star Picture Agency, 7–8. Smith’ study relies, among others, on an interview with Ernest Mayer recorded on May 22, 1978.

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Apart from Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Newsweek and Parade were considered potential markets for picture stories.149 Black Star, Pix Publishing and others profited from the development of photojournalism in the USA in the 1930s and beyond. They acted as intermediaries between émigré photographers and the American newspaper and magazine market, or, as Zoe C. Smith has put it, “Black Star served as a conduit for many émigrés fleeing Europe who wanted to pursue a career in photojournalism in the United States.”150 Advertising, a lucrative field for illustrators, photographers and picture agencies, also opened up a wealth of possibilities: Compared to what transpired in American advertising, European advertising was revolutionized during the twenties. In Russia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, the image of advertising was transformed, as was most subsequent art and design. Russian constructivism, Dutch De Stijl, French l’Art décoratif and the work of the German Bauhaus were all successfully incorporated into the domain of commercial advertising.151

Alongside the agencies that focused on news pictures and contemporary photography, severe competition also arose over the commercialization of historical images. Those involved either had long-standing archives and business connections or, as newcomers, pursued strategies similar to that adopted by the Bettmann Archive. Apart from the large publishing houses, which set up archives in order to reuse their material, the notable enterprises in the field included Brown Brothers, which was founded in 1904 and had a large collection of stereoscopic pictures and glass plate negatives and was a well-established name in the USA.152 The photographer Max Peter Haas, who like Bettmann had emigrated from Germany, started his own business in 1935, the European Picture Service, an agency that concentrated on the distribution of European picture collections as well as contemporary photography. The company that according to Bettmann was his most direct competitor was Culver Pictures, which had been founded in the early 1920s in Philadelphia and possessed an extensive collection of

149 Ibid., 12.

150 Ibid., 2.

151 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 33.

152 See company website of Brown Brothers, http://www.brownbrothersusa.com/], See also Miller, “Pictures for rent,” 124.

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nineteenth-century visual material.153 Culver Pictures dominated the American market for historical photographs on the one hand by taking over countless picture collections, including the holdings of the ‘first’ American press picture agency, the Bain Picture Service. On the other, Culver Pictures maintained an archive of reproductions referred to as graphic history, photographic reproductions from the nineteenth-century pictorial magazines, which Bettmann too had recognized as an important source of images.154

The Bettmann Archive – Responding to the Market Given the vast field of competitors and the fact that the Bettmann Archive initially offered only historical illustrations from Europe – which was both an advantage and a disadvantage – its business model and profile increasingly took shape and adapted to the new circumstances and demand by expanding its collection. Judging from his own account, Bettmann had only very limited financial means for developing his company; he was, however, well aware that in order to distribute historical pictures successfully in the US market, his company needed a clear rhetorical and thematic identity. During a presentation in the New York office of Condé Nast art director Dr. Agha, the latter offered Bettmann the following advice, “We got plenty of photographers…. What we need in America are specialists! Try to concentrate on one subject – like dogs, so I can put you under ‘dogs’ in my index.”155 Those who wished to survive among the myriad of agencies and long-established contacts and structures had both to present distinctive content in a specific area, whether it was photojournalism, historical pictures, animal photography or something else and to distinguish themselves by quick availability, competitive prices and good conditions. Moreover, photographs that generated demand had to offer something special both aesthetically and thematically, something rare. As the handbook Cash From Your Camera suggested, a promising photograph was “any photograph which is out of the ordinary and has appeal from the unusual feature…. The oddity or uniqueness of a picture are [sic] strong factors in putting it over.”156 In contrast, “the ordinary travel

153 See company website of Culver Pictures, http://www.culverpictures.com/.

154 Bettmann, Picture Man, 56–57.

155 Ibid., 49.

156 Rossiter Synder, Cash From Your Camera, 3.

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or scenic pictures find little sale due to much gratis material on the market.”157 The virtually unlimited supply of photographs, photographic reproductions of all kinds and gratis material meant that making a choice among the pictures on offer no longer followed thematic or aesthetic qualities alone, or competitive prices, but increasingly also the complementary services that an agency could provide.

The Bettmann Archive aspired to distinguish itself from other agencies and commercial photo archives both through the materials and the additional services it provided. In so doing, it was subject to a conflict that all suppliers of images, whether photographers, picture agencies or commercial picture libraries, ultimately face. On the one hand, the need to specialize necessarily entails a reduction in thematic variety.

On the other hand, the material has to be as extensive as possible, or suggest that any image the client desires can be supplied. The photographs must distinguish themselves from the mass of images in order to attract the attention of picture editors and ad executives. Every company faces the challenge of being able to meet all demands in order to bind customers in the long run or acquire new ones.

The Bettmann Archive responded to this dichotomy by establishing a basic framework of flexible and expandable categories, as demonstrated with regard to the “List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries.” To set itself apart from its rivals, the company strongly emphasized its capacity to supply fresh material within these individual categories at competitive prices. Thus in the short-lived “Bettmann Archive Newsletter” launched in 1940, the Archive noted that despite their great rarity, its pictures were available “at rates commensurate with those charged for ordinary news stock photographs.”158 Whether or not the Bettmann Archive lived up to these standards is relative; the postulate of rarity and uniqueness may apply better to some categories or individual images than others. What counted, though, is that the Bettmann Archive’s concept also transformed less ‘special,’ valueless or value-free images into “picture gems.”159 The core idea was that a picture could be rendered more valuable by the actions and

157 Ibid.

158 Bettmann Archive ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no.3 (1941).

159 Ibid.

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services surrounding it. An essential aspect here, and one in which the Bettmann Archive doubtless excelled, was the carefully balanced verbal and visual rhetoric the company employed to convey the idea of a clearly defined identity and a highly selective authority, while still suggesting a vast and wide-ranging collection. It was thus no coincidence that the first category of the Bettmann Portable Archive was a thematic and highly eclectic compilation of spectacular or utopian representations under the heading “Absurdities,” which was intended to be characteristic of the collection’s originality (Figure 14). 160

Figure 14: “Absurdities Category.” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966, 11.

The reputed singularity of the Bettmann Archive’s holdings is perhaps most evident in its relatively extensive collection of photographic reproductions of artworks and book illustrations from European museums and libraries that were unavailable or difficult to procure in the USA. These reproductions were not limited to the most outstanding works treated by art historians, a field in which the Bettmann Archive could not compete anyway with museums or the established agencies specializing in art reproductions, but instead encompassed a rather non-hierarchical conglomeration of “subject pictures.”

160 Bettmann, Picture Man, 101.

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In the realm of “graphic science fiction,” an important category for the Bettmann Archive, alongside the illustrations of Athanasius Kircher, the illustrations and cartoons of the French writer, artist and illustrator Albert Robida (1848–1926) were a rich source of utopian images. Robida was considered the “Jules Verne of the sketch pad and magazine drawing,”161 he produced more than 6,000 drawings and illustrated numerous books. In the magazine La Caricature, which he edited, and the science fiction novels “Le Vingtième Siècle” (1883), “La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle” (1887) and “La Vingtième Siècle. La Vie éléctrique” (1890), (Figure 15), Robida published his fictional visions of the future,162 including drawings of “air taxis, transatlantic balloons, aerial hotels, apartment blocks made from compressed paper, the telephonoscope and television for all, synthetic foods, submarine cities, underwater sports and a women-only stock exchange.”163

Figure 15: Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle.

La Vie Eléctrique, 1890. Front cover, drawn illustration.

The Bettmann Archive’s claim to possess unusual or singular pictures was thus not incorrect, especially in regard to the American market. In regard to quantity, though, this assertion was certainly exaggerated and an element of marketing rhetoric. In order to serve the American market, however, the Bettmann Archive collection originally produced in Berlin had to be expanded to include new categories, especially Americana – illustrations on American history, politics and society – which would soon com161 Ian F. Clark, “Future-War Fiction: the First Main Phase,” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 3 (1997): 387–412, here: 397.

162 See also website “Association des Amis d’Albert Robida,” http://www.robida.info/.

163 Clark, “Future–War Fiction,” 397.

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prise the greater part of the Archive. Pictures of the American Civil War, the streets of New York, tourist sights, portraits of presidents, American writers and actors and the like. In order to expand his Archive, Bettmann continued his strategy of reproducing library and museum holdings and purchasing illustrated books and increasingly acquired entire picture collections or “photo-morgues.”164 Although selections were made from these collections, the purchase of larger picture collections was an efficient means of expanding the size of the Bettmann Archive cheaply and quickly. There was, however, no genuine specialization in the sense of a focus on particular themes. On the contrary, the Bettmann Archive was designed to be able to fulfil any picture order.

According to an excerpt from the 1941 Bettmann Archive Newsletter, We supply upon request and without obligation whatsoever, a selection of 5’’ by 7’’ glossy photographs ready for reproduction. Subjects cover any industry, profession, event, invention. Mention your requirements, and a fine group of prints will be sent for your examination.165

But how was the Archive to attract the attention of potential customers with a collection that was characterized neither by outstanding pictures nor by a sharply defined and narrow thematic focus? A collection that did not include contemporary photography or works of photojournalism, that offered reproductions of artworks, but not of a technically high quality or representative of the most significant works of the art historical canon from European collections? A collection that consisted mainly of nonexclusive images which could generally be found elsewhere as well?

The answer to these questions lies in the Bettmann Archive’s dual function: While suggesting the availability of an endless supply of material – “we supply upon request and without obligation whatsoever” – it also transported the idea of connoisseurship as part of the company’s service, which was vouched for by Bettmann’s status as an (art) historian and librarian. As Bettmann put it, “I took consolation in the thought that my background as an art historian and librarian might enable me to make a fresh contribution to American picture research.”166 This is precisely what contributed to

164 Bettmann, Picture Man, 83.

165 Bettmann Archive ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no. 3 (1941).

166 Bettmann, Picture Man, 56–57.

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a picture’s material value: the capacity to find images, to make a pertinent selection and to process them conceptually. The Bettmann Archive regarded itself not merely as a distribution agency, but also as a catalyst for ideas and a picture-finding machine – a service in the form of Bettmann as the ultimate picture editor who “locates and discards images,”167 thereby saving the customer time and labour. As a constitutive element of the strategy of transfer between high and popular culture, Bettmann propagated and cultivated his image as an academic as well as the rhetoric of picture gems – the visual treasures that the Bettmann Archive collected, or could be recovered from the depths of visual culture. The portrait of Bettmann with a magnifying glass (Figure 3) appears repeatedly in Bettmann’s self-representations, as is evident from two illustrations published in Bettmann’s autobiography (Figures 16 and 17). These photographs were taken at the beginning of Bettmann’s career in the USA and towards the end of his active years as director of the Bettmann Archive.

Figure 16: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann in His Office with Magnifying Glass.”

Photograph, ca. 1935–1940.

Figure 17: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann Viewing an Illustrated Book.” Photograph, ca. 1980.

167 Hanscom, “A ‘little Bettmann Archive’ for Everyone,” 32–33. Hanscom brings it to the point, when stating, “essentially what the Bettmann Archive as to sell is a service that saves a client infinite, perhaps prohibitive labor.” The article also cites Bettmann himself, characterizing his professional service: “People pay me for finding pictures, and for eliminating them – that is for screening thousands of pictures so that only a good choice remains.”

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Figure 3: Michael O’Connor, “Portrait of Otto Bettmann with Magnifying Glass,” ca.

1988. In Bettmann, Picture

Man, 1992: 3.

The evocation of the ‘Man with magnifying glass’ generates an entire series of associations, which can be derived from pictorial comparisons (Figures 18–21). One could mention the precision of a scientist analyzing, arranging and classifying his specimen, equipped with a microscope and reference works (Figure 18). The pictures also suggest the habitus of a picture editor or photographer scrutinizing negatives or slides for details in order to make a selection from among the pictorial material (Figure 19); or the figure of the stamp collector, who requires a magnifying glass to look at the miniature formats (Figure 20), as well as a dealer in gemstones,168 who uses a loupe to determine the quality of his precious wares and test their authenticity (Figure 21). What these interpretive approaches have in common is the authority of the selecting and examining subject who handles his objects of study and collections with care and precision. The magnifying glass acts here as an instrument of seeing and suggests the preciousness and rarity of the objects. The topos of the ‘Man with magnifying glass’ also plays with the idea of formats: tiny objects, whether insects, negatives, postage stamps or precious gems can be magnified at will for the purposes of examination.

168 The association of gem trade with the picture market is borrowed from Cherye Kramer’s article on the Bettmann Archive, see Kramer, “© Bettmann/CORBIS,” 285.

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Figure 19: Pierre Vauthey/ Corbis, “Photographer JacquesHenri Lartigue Looks at Slides in His Paris Home.”

Photograph, September 20, 1974.

Figure 18: Anne Clopet/Corbis, “Lepidomterist Jacques Pierre Doing Research.” Photograph, ca. 1990–1998.

Figure 20: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, “President Roosevelt with His Stamp Collection.” Photograph, ca.

May 1936.

Figure 21: Maurice Maurel/ Bettmann, Corbis, “Man Marking Diamond with India Ink.” Photograph, June 24, 1961.

A further motif that supports these associations and a visual interpretation of a picture researcher is an undated and unlabeled image within an image featuring Bettmann, in which he assumes the guise of the prototypical detective: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention Sherlock Holmes, with Bettmann as the ultimate picture sleuth (Figure 22).

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Figure 22: Bettmann Archive, “Bettmann as Sherlock Holmes.” Photograph, ca.

1980–1990.

Conclusion The analysis of the concept of subject pictures shows that Bettmann was inspired by modern philosophy, art history and history teachings, yet, he employed these influences for structuring and exploiting the collection commercially. For instance, while iconography as an art historical method aims at creating and reconstructing meaning, Bettmann’s approach de-contextualized the image and reduced its meaning in order to recycle it. The selection criteria for the development of the Bettmann collection consisted in the relevance of the iconographic content of an image, its fast and easy legibility as well as technical aspects, including good reproducibility. The criteria for selection were also influenced by the organizational structure, in particular the classification system as well as market expectations. The latter were a driving force for the development of the Bettmann Archive, which had to re-invent itself on the American picture market, a market essentially controlled by already established companies, but one that also allowed for the creation of new ideas, products and businesses. In New York, Bettmann was able to build on contacts with fellow émigrés working in the fields of graphic design, publishing and advertising, which facilitated the re-establishment of his company. An decisive attribute in this endeavour was the creation of a distinct business profile emphasizing the singularity of the stock and the superiority of the company’s services. However, what distinguished the Bettmann Archive from its competitors was not so much the uniqueness, originality or aesthetic qualities of its products. It functioned as a commercial picture library with a quasi-scholarly authority, embedded in a well-calculated verbal and visual rhetoric that placed the company’s image and reputation in the service of the popular media and the advertising industry.

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3. Pictorial Products 3.1 “Old Prints and Photographs in Modern Use” 169 and Beyond While the early collection consisted primarily of reproductions of art works, as time passed the focus increasingly shifted to other categories: namely, to historical photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which were either collected or reproduced from books, magazines, or other image sources. The recycling of both historical photographs and drawn illustrations seemed promising because drawings continued to be a widespread medium in advertising design and book illustration, despite the increasing popularity of photography. Compared to commissioning a draftsman or illustrator, the mechanical reproduction of drawings had the obvious advantage of quick and relatively cheap availability, as recycling made it possible to circumvent the manual work of the illustrator. The preference for mechanical reproduction was concisely explained

by Jan Tschichold, who proclaimed in 1928, “it would be absolutely impossible today to satisfy the enormous demand for printed illustrations with drawings and paintings.

There would be neither enough artists of quality to produce them, nor time for their creation and reproduction.... Such an extraordinary consumption could never be satisfied except by mechanical means.”170 By recycling drawn illustrations, the Bettmann Archive traded in this established market while simultaneously supplying the market for historical photographs. In the commercial philosophy of the Bettmann Archive, there was no distinction between reproduced drawings and reproduced photographs, no preference for art works over miscellaneous images as commodities: all were considered equally valuable, and photography served as an instrument of image transfer and mobility.

The range of pictorial products offered by the Bettmann Archive was remarkably wide: from single pictures to portfolios, illustrated texts, and complete picture stories, the Archive offered services “from the evaluation of a single print and data, to the assembling of a complete historic museum of your trade or industry.”171 169 This phrase refers to an advertisement displayed in one of the meeting rooms of the Bettmann Archive in the Tishman Building. See “From A-Z: New Offices for Bettmann Archive,” Interior Design 32 (November, 1961): 150-151.

170 Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie. Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäß Schaffende, [1928], 2nd edition (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1987), 89. Jan Tschischold, New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, trans.

by Ruari McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 87.

171 Bettmann Archive, ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no. 3 (1941).

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As has been argued thus far, the Bettmann Archive’s business model was decidedly influenced by the socio-cultural environment of Berlin and the late Weimar Republic; however, it was only after Bettmann’s emigration to New York that the enterprise expanded and truly became professionalized. Sources suggest that Bettmann, like many others, was able to build on his personal and professional contacts in émigré circles.

Apart from his friend Julius Held, another important contact in the picture agency world was Leon Daniels, co-founder of Pix Publishing in New York: My first Thanksgiving in America was modest, but reassuring in a way.

Leon Daniels, a fellow refugee whom I had known in Berlin as manager of the Associated Press, offered to celebrate with me.... He brought along a friend. My eyes lit up when Leon introduced him as Alfred Eisenstaedt, already well known in Europe and soon to become one of Life’s leading photographers.... Leon Daniels, like myself, was to become the founder of a picture agency.172

Bettmann also maintained contacts in New York’s community of graphic artists and the publishing world, some of these dating back to his time in Berlin; this facilitated his integration into the American picture market.173 These contacts included Paul Renner, Herbert Bayer, and the trendsetting typography and graphic design workshop known as the Composing Room.174 The services Bettmann developed in his new homeland primarily targeted publishers, advertising professionals, and designers. In relation to the markets for which they were created, the pictorial products can be divided into two main categories: pictures intended as illustrations for books, magazines, and newspapers, and pictures that could serve as the raw material for advertising design. However, this distinction would increasingly become blurred over time.

172 Bettmann, Picture Man, 45.

173 Bettmann mentions that he met Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, shortly after his arrival; the two were to become lifelong friends. Bettmann also makes reference to Lincoln Schuster, the founder of the American publishing company Simon and Schuster. See Otto Bettmann, interview, 1971, see note 4, Part II. 174 Founded in 1927 by Sol Cantor and Dr. Robert L. Leslie, The Composing Room, located in New York, one of the leading and most influential typesetting firms thrived on the growth of the advertising and printing industry in the interwar period. The Composing Room became the sponsor for a variety of intellectual and educational endeavors starting with PM and A-D magazines, graphic arts courses, the A-D Gallery, Gallery 303 and eventually the lecture series Heritage of the Graphic Arts in the 1960’s. See, among others, Steven Heller, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, 2nd. ed. (New York: Allworth Press, 2004) 55–56.

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3.2 Selling Illustrations, Selling Inspiration Bettmann had a special affinity for books, and throughout his life he regarded himself as a “book man”175 as well as a “picture man.” Not only was he a librarian by profession, also but his dissertation had dealt in detail with the history of publishing and the book trade. He took photographs from books and magazines, he collected books, he wrote books, and he published picture stories. Coming from this background, especially in the early years the Bettmann Archive concentrated on the distribution of historical images for the illustration of editorial content in books and magazines, and only more rarely for newspapers. Bettmann cites the provision of illustrations for a tenvolume series of books on world history as one of his first major projects, a commission that the Bettmann Archive carried out in 1937.176 Pictures for illustrated encyclopaedias, history books, and a broad range of textbooks followed.177 Magazines made up the largest share of the Archive’s work, overshadowing earnings from book illustrations and occasional picture sales for postcards and calendars, which may be classified under the rubric of utilitarian editiorial products. Since magazines are ephemeral media compared to books, they generated higher and cyclical demand. As has been argued in Part I, the development of the picture market and thus the expansion of the Bettmann Archive would have been unthinkable without the high level of demand from both established and newly founded illustrated magazines. Offering both individual prints and picture features, the Bettmann Archive supplied numerous popular magazines and journals, including Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, The American Weekly, and The Rotarian.178 Examples of picture features using historical material can be found in Life, to which the Bettmann Archive sold photographs and ideas beginning in 1937 and with increasing frequency from the 1940s on. For example, the Archive was able to place a piece with six illustrations from Albert Robida’s 1883 La Guerre au vingtième siècle in the “Speaking of Pictures” section of the June 15, 1942 issue, about six months after the USA entered Second world war.179 In addition to the main photo

175 Bettmann, Picture Man, 8–9.

176 Ibid., 53.

177 For an analysis of the American book trade and reading habits during the 1920s and 1930s, see Welky, Everything was Better in America, 2008.

178 Bettmann, Picture Man, 54. In his autobiography, Bettmann elaborates as follows: “Bennett [Arnold Bennett, Bettmann’s first hired assistant] had a flair for combining some of the material in my files to create ‘picture features.’ These we tried to peddle to magazines.”

179 Life Magazine, June 15, 1942, 12–13.

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stories covering the latest political and social events, Life’s “Speaking of Pictures” section presented a wider variety of thematic illustrations. Marketed as pictorial futurism, the article entitled “Speaking of Pictures...A Frenchman Foresaw Mechanized War in 1883” consisted of a combination of text and image in a ratio of approximately 1:8 in a two-page spread (Figure 23).

Figure 23: “Speaking of Pictures … A Frenchman Foresaw Mechanized War in 1883,” (doublepage). In Life, June 15, 1942: 12–13.

As a complementary service, the Archive not only provided the pictures, but also researched their historical contexts and wrote descriptive captions as well as more detailed texts. Combining images and texts into ready-made stories and selling these as image/text products was reminiscent of the photojournalistic picture story for which agencies such as Dephot in Berlin had once been famous;180 this genre also achieved (relatively delayed) popularity and widespread use in the American press. In the case of the Robida images, the relationship between image and text, or rather the dominance of the images and the simple, unadorned graphic design that characterized the picture stories published in Life was implemented to showcase historical pictures. An additional example that invokes the design and format of the picture story, and for

180 For a history of Dephot, see Molderings, “Eine Schule der modernen Fotoreportage,” 2008. See note 2, Part I.

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which the Bettmann Archive supplied both photographs and ideas, was the photo gallery “Mulberry Bend,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 under the title “The Post Picture Story.” Bettmann had purchased these pictures at the estate sale of the medical doctor and amateur photographer William J. Bartlett, who had documented street life in New York’s Lower East Side around 1900. Publicized as an example of early street photography, this picture story was trumpeted in the accompanying text as a veritable photographic rediscovery: “Long stored in a trunk and forgotten, they are finally published on these pages, following their discovery by graphic historian Otto Bettmann” (Figure 24). Moreover, to emphasize the before-and-after-effect, Bartlett’s scenes were re-enacted and re-photographed by Marjory Lewis in 1958 and printed alongside the historical photographs (right-hand column).

Figure 24: “Mulberry Bend.”

In Saturday Evening Post, (doublepage), August 2, 1958: 34–35.

In addition, the Bettmann Archive also compiled longue-durée picture stories using pictures of varying provenance and era that illustrated a certain theme over a longer time period, such as a feature on the history of Canadian-American relations published in the magazine The Rotarian, for which the Bettmann Archive supplied photographs,

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maps, and drawings.181 However, the sale of pictorial features that were put together by a single provider such as the Bettmann Archive appears to have been the exception. Far more frequently, individual pictures were sold as background information for current political or social events – for example, for the Life story “Iran: Ancient Land Is Seat of Trouble”182 in the April 8, 1946 issue, or for a multi-page article entitled “Calendars: Once Laboriously Calculated and Carved in Stone, They Are Printed Today by the Millions.”183 The picture editors at Life and The Rotarian often ordered images from different providers to illustrate a single article or picture story, as a Rotarian piece on the Statue of Liberty shows: the article combines photographs by Margaret Bourke-White from ACME and historical reproductions from both the Bettmann Archive and their competitor Culver Pictures184 (Figure 25).

Figure 25: “She’s still a thriller,” In The Rotarian, May 1949: 16–17.

181 “Fixing Friendly Frontiers,” The Rotarian, September 1941, 19–25.

182 “Iran: Ancient Land Is Seat of Trouble,” Life Magazine, April 8, 1946, 30–36.

183 “Calendars: Once Laboriously Calculated and Carved in Stone, They Are Printed Today by the Millions,” Life Magazine, January 1, 1945, 42–43.

184 “She’s Still a Thriller!” The Rotarian, May 1949, 16–19.

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Figure 25 (cont.): “She’s still a thriller.” In The Rotarian, May 1949, 18–19.

The Bettmann Archive, like most contemporary agencies with access to historical images, compiled “timely features”185 in anticipation of coming events or in response to current ones, which included the picture stories on nineteenth-century ideas of future military technology and the history of Iran. The timely features were also a means of bringing less frequently sold material into circulation. In order to enhance the visibility of its holdings, the Bettmann Archive also published its own brochures and books; these were directed at potential customers as prototypes or inspiration for possible picture stories, but they were also motivated by Bettmann’s pedagogical ambitions. Early examples were the Educational Forum Portfolios published from 1941 on, including The Story of the Wheel, The Story of Roads, The Story of Vehicles, and Street Life and Inns Through the Ages. The compilation of images from various sources and media, both photographs and drawings, enabled the construction of a visual trajectory. Historical images were employed to depict the different facets of a subject and to suggest continu185 Bettmann, Picture Man, 54.

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ity and the subject’s relevance for modern readers.

Economically speaking, however, another market was of far greater significance to the Bettmann Archive than journalism and the publishing industry: specifically, the advertising market, as documented by Bettmann’s account: In the early days of the Archive, our picture sales were made mostly to newspapers, magazines, and publishers. But a friend I had made, Allen Klein, an account representative at a medical advertising agency, tipped me off that book publishing was not where the ‘real money’ was. To improve my income, I would have to break into advertising. Whereas textbook houses and newspapers paid five dollars a picture, promotional fees for an ad illustration could go into the hundreds. The advertising market opened up for me in a fortuitous manner.... It was one of those strange twists of fate.186

3.3 The Art of Advertising Alongside illustrations for magazines and books and utilitarian images, a variety of pictorial products targeting the advertising industry also evolved; some were independent suggestions by the Bettmann Archive, others were developed in conjunction with art directors, ad men, typographers, and designers (Figure 26). The products on offer ranged from a single image used as a raw material for an advertising design or the integration of an image into an advertising concept to complete picture stories or picture sequences. Compared to editorial products, the Bettmann Archive could charge higher fees for advertising images. According to a letter in response to a client’s request dated April 13, 1961, the prices for the editorial use of Bettmann pictures were $25 per picture, with cover pictures costing between $50 and $75. Advertising rates, however, were adjusted to the size and distribution of the advertisements.187

186 Ibid., 66.

187 See letter from the Bettmann Archive to Mr. Martin Master, manager of the advertising company Pioneer Industries Inc., un-catalogued item, Corbis film preservation facility.

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Figure 26: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann with Clients.”

Photograph, ca. 1965.

The illustration by Athanasius Kircher used as an advertising concept for Columbia Broadcasting Services (CBS) (Figure 5) is worth closer scrutiny in this context. Incorporated into an extensive explanatory spread researched and written by the Bettmann Archive, Kircher’s illustration for the Musurgia Universalis published in 1650,188 depicts the model of a loudspeaker system and details its functions. In relation to the text, the picture takes up about half of the page of the advertisement. The visual reference to the history of technology and science is framed by the text, which explains Kircher’s model and places it in relation to contemporary studies of perception of the spoken and printed word. The text does not explicitly mention the CBS, but promotes it indirectly by promoting the phenomenon of radio as living voice. Bettmann selected this picture from Kircher’s richly illustrated Musurgia Universalis, an antiquated but widely distributed work on acoustics and musical genres, since a connection could be drawn to the present – i.e., to the new medium of radio – thus enabling the recycling of the 188 See note 29, Part II.

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image. The primary criterion for using an image was its reusability and relevance to the present, rather than reasons of purely art historical or historical interest. In addition to this rather elaborate design, Bettmann’s creations also include specimens such as an advertisement for the Kingsbeer beer company (Figure 27), in which an untitled late-eighteenth-century engraving serves as the basis for the advertising copy. Unusually for advertisements, in both instances (CBS radio and Kingsbeer) the origin of the images was clearly specified as being “From the Bettmann Archive.”

Figure 27: Bettmann Archive, “Advertisement for Kingsbeer Brewery.” Photograph, ca.

1940.

Figure 28: “You Can’t Patent That.” In The Rotarian, September 1946: 29.

An article on patents entitled “You Can’t Patent That,” which appeared in The Rotarian in 1946, further illuminates the recycling and de- or re-contextualization of pictures as the guiding philosophy and practice of the Bettmann Archive (Figure 28). As the collage demontstrates, it was not unheard of for the Bettmann Archive to sell identical material multiple times and for different purposes: both the engraving used for

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the beer ad (below left) and Athanasius Kircher’s print from the Musurgia Universalis (upper right side) were re-used in the Rotarian-collage. The same image could serve to advertise a product such as a brand of beer or a radio broadcaster and also to illustrate a text about patents. This flexibility or adaptability of content is also evident on the formal level: Images were cut, mirrored, retouched, and rendered available in many forms. They served as raw material that was expected to be adaptable to fit into an idea for an advertisement or a text, and into a pre-determined format. Another example that helps to demonstrate the Bettmann Archive’s approach is German illustrator and graphic artist Toni Zepf’s 1938 design for an advertisement for the Container Corporation of America (Figure 29).189

Figure 29: Toni Zepf, “Advertisement for Container Corporation of America.”

Photograph, 1938.

Founded in 1926 by Walter Paepke, beginning in the mid-1930s the Container Corporation of America (CCA) became a pivotal promoter of American advertising art, that marriage between European-influenced avant-garde art and the advertising industry,

189 A photographic print of this advertisement was part of the Bettmann Archive papers. Even though there is no explicit mention that this picture belonged to the Bettmann collection, I assume that it was a copy proof sent to the Archive.

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and was thus central to the history of American industrial design.190 The integration of historical images or pictorial elements into a composition was not atypical of the CCA’s advertising campaigns, which were created between 1930 and 1950 by graphic designers and artists including Herbert Bayer, Herbert Mattern, György Kepes, Ferdinand Léger, and Man Ray. In Zepf’s design, the illustration of a baroque concert provided by the Bettmann Archive functions as a visual counterpart to the title of the advertisement, “Harmony,” which suggests the company’s smooth and trouble-free provision of services.

As the above-mentioned quotation implies, Bettmann was well aware of advertising’s potential both as an art form and a market. This is not very surprising, since during his Berlin years, Bettmann dealt closely with advertising art and the New Typography movement. In addition to his reviews of contemporary illustrators and graphic artists for the respected German-English bilingual journal Gebrauchsgraphik,191 Bettmann wrote an article for the British graphic arts magazine the Penrose Annual in 1930 entitled “Elements of the New German Typography.”192 In obvious reference to the work of Jan Tschichold, the article emphasized the role of advertising in the aesthetic style and reorganization of typography: The present [printing and typographic] reform starts from advertising work. Here, not in the domain of the book, the new style has been born.

This change is a consequence of economic conditions…. The industry has great demand in printed matter and is a better customer than the publisher, who just now has to fight against difficulties in Germany. So it seems only natural that the printing industry adapted itself to the task of this lucrative line.193

While book design was also affected by typographical and stylistic reforms, and although photography was used with increasing frequency as a medium of illustration for books, progress and change were most visible in advertising, since, as Bettmann noted, “the industry… disposes of rich resources, whilst the publishers are passing 190 For a history of the Container Corporation of America and Walter Paepke’s influence on American industrial design, see Julie Jones, “L’avant-garde européenne au service du capitalisme. Walter P. Paepke et le couple art/commerce aux États-Unis (1930–1950),” Etudes Photographiques 24, November 2009: 42–71.

191 See note 23, Part II. 192 Otto Bettmann, “Elements of the New German Typography,” The Penrose Annual, 32 (1930): 116–121.

193 Ibid., 117.

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through a sort of crisis.”194 Highlighting the aesthetic and conceptual potential of magazine advertising, Bettmann commented further: “Every periodical brings advertisements striking by the clearness of their arrangement and quickly leads the harassed worker of the present to the essential meaning.”195 Although both the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann and the Bettmann Archive were oriented towards the distribution of historical images and not contemporary photography, Bettmann had a definite affinity for the New Typography movement, as underlined by the following statement he made in retrospect: Like many other young people, I carried this enthusiasm for new approaches and modern ideas into my own field of interest, that of printing and books. In this field, ‘functional typography’ was the innovation of the day – applauded by some for its clean design, condemned by others for its stripped-down coldness. Paul Renner’s Futura was then the typeface of choice, the expression of modernity in print… I became an enthusiastic adherent of the new school and met the circle of typographic pioneers headed by Jan Tschichold and Herbert Bayer…. Of particular interest to me was the innovative way in which these new designers made photography and textual material work together to communicate ideas.196

For Bettmann, the combination of a pictorial element and typography as an advertising technique was not restricted to photographs in the sense of the typo-photo as defined by Tschichold (photography used as typographic material); rather, it extended to the entire range of photographically reproduced illustrations. The New Typography and contemporary design reform were significant for him because of the combination of image and text as modes of communication, a principle he intended to apply to historical pictures and images of all kinds. What Bettmann especially valued about photography was its technical quality, an aspect particularly central to the concept of typo-photography. Pictures could be translated into the photographic medium and reprocessed as a combination of different elements into a holistic design. As a medium of collage, photography opened up new paths for design and the use of images, thereby suggesting unprecedented flexibility and freedom in working with pictures.

194 Ibid., 120.

195 Ibid.

196 Bettmann, Picture Man, 23.

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Figure 30: Bettmann Archive, “Advertisement for the Bettmann Archive.” Imprint on paper, ca. 1945.

A 1945 advertisement for the Bettmann Archive illustrates this concept in exemplary form (Figure 30). The ad targeted advertising professionals, “selling inspiration to the nation’s admen.” The Bettmann Archive, it states, “offers innumerable idea-inspiring picture prints…. They will put new sales impetus into your message... Every conceivable subject of interest to you.”197 This self-promotion documents the incorporation of three ‘picture gems’ shown on the left side of the page (“The Rococo lady surrounded by private cosmeticians, Surugue, 1743, Order no. B44.07,” “The Cold Shower, as administered prior to modern bathing fixtures, Daumier, 1847, Order no. 250.19,” and “Locked seats for impatient audiences, Wagner caricature by Cham, 1862, Order no.

B9.09”) into three product advertisements, reproduced in smaller format on the right side. The Bettmann Archive sold inspiration – images that gave birth to ideas and concepts for advertisements. The notion of the picture as a raw material that required processing to take its place in an overall composition as a visual element alongside 197 Original wording of the advertisement: “Selling inspiration to the nation‘s admen. The Bettmann Archive offers you innumerable idea-inspiring picture prints. They will put new sales impetus into your message...help you create captivating ad campaigns, editorials, picture spreads. These fine, action-filled Bettmann photos bring to life customs, foibles, inventions, manufacturing methods of long ago. They portray industrial, social, and scientific progress.”

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typography and text is especially evident here. The idea of the picture as a discrete entity, the integrity of the image, was relinquished in favour of the extraction of pictorial elements. A picture was to function as a resource from which individual elements could be extracted, a view wholly in keeping with the idea of mobility, and which took the concept of image mining quite literally. While it could be argued that this process enhanced the circulation of images that were rarely seen, the recycling of historical images for advertisements and other editorial creations also led to the vulgarization of the image content.

Bettmann’s affinity for the New Typography, his interactions with those involved with the journal Gebrauchsgraphik and the graphic designers Jan Tschichold, Paul Renner, and Herbert Bayer, and his later relationships with the New York graphic design community based around the typesetting firm The Composing Room198 revealed itself not least in the previously mentioned business emblem of the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann (Figure 4) and the version adapted for the Bettmann Archive (Figure 31).199 Designed around 1933 by Eduard Sauer, it made use of a sans-serif Grotesque font (an expression of modern design), in combination with the visual plasticity of the framed initial. As a graphic historian, Bettmann followed developments in graphic design and their interactions with contemporary artistic trends throughout his career.

Figure 4: Eduard Sauer, “Business Emblem, Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin.”

Photograph, ca. 1933.

Figure 31: Business emblem, “The Bettmann Archive, New York, ca. 1936.” In Bettmann, Picture Man, 1992, 51.

Measured by its changing addresses and number of employees, the Bettmann Archive 198 J. Abbott Miller, “Pictures for Rent: From Steroscope to Sterotype,” in Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, ed. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996): 121–134, here 125.

199 The emblem uses a sans-serif type, which reflected the modernisation of graphic design in the first decades of the twentieth century. The emblem may further be understood in a symbolic way: the design is reminiscent of ex libris bookplates or signets that mark the ownership and provenance of books (literally, “from the books” or “from the library of”). Ex libris bookplate design was an illustrative genre in its own right, associated with connoisseurship and intellectuality.

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established itself quite rapidly in the market: by 1939, just three years after the Bettmann Archive was founded in Bettmann’s home, the company already had a staff of four. The Archive expanded spatially in 1943, moving to 57th Street near the Museum of Modern Art, an area known for its many antiquarian bookshops. Twelve years later, the Bettmann Archive had outgrown its space once again. From its basement premises on the Upper East Side, in 1961 it moved to the Tishman Building, a newly constructed office building on the same street. The reasons for the success of the Bettmann Archive despite the fierce competition in the market were manifold. They lay partly in the great demand for visual imagery, and partly in the versatility of the company’s products and services. The Bettmann Archive was able to cater to many different needs: it provided both single images and picture stories, and it sold illustrations and inspiration for editorial and advertising content, among other services. The company’s versatility became particularly evident with regard to advertising.

In concert with the general development of the advertising industry in the 1920s and 1930s, three factors appear to have been key for the Bettmann Archive’s commercial success and establishment as a leading provider of images for advertising. First of all, the Bettmann Archive’s products were aimed less towards the advertising campaigns of major companies – CBS was something of an exception here – and more towards advertising campaigns and print advertisements for smaller companies. These businesses generally had a lower advertising budget than large firms; consequently, they tended to resort to using reproduced illustrations from the collections of the Bettmann Archive or other stock photography agencies rather than commissioning an illustrator or photographer to realize a pictorial idea. For small and mid-sized companies and advertising agencies, the attraction of a commercial picture agency was that they could view a large number of images, make a preliminary selection, and pay only for the pictures they actually decided to use. The Bettmann Archive operated according to this very principle: “You retain the prints you want, return the others, and pay for those you keep.”200 Although the ultimate costs were not necessarily lower than those of commissioned work, the process and services were far less complicated for clients and also spared them possible disappointment.201 As a whole, the sum of these smaller transactions presumably represented a fair share of the Archive’s sales. Another pos200 Bettmann Archive ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no.3 (1941).

201 Edward Austin Searle, “The £’s of Advertising Photography,” Advertising Monthly, January (1938), 39, cited in Wilkenson, “The New Heraldry,” 23–38.

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sible explanation for the Archive’s success was that advertising designers were increasingly using drawn illustrations or photographs with no direct association to the product – a new means of employing images. It was no longer necessary to depict the product being promoted; this image could be replaced by a drawn or photographed illustration that evoked a feeling or way of life associated with the product or with a certain aesthetic. A third reason for the success of the Bettmann Archive may lie in the development of advertising and specifically advertising psychology in the first half of the twentieth century, a subject that has attracted little attention to date.202 As Marchand stresses, not everyone in the advertising world welcomed the influence of European avant-garde art in American advertising aesthetics in the 1920s and 1930s, as “many cited the ease with which ‘even charlatans’ could ape the modernist style; others felt strongly that modernism was essentially foreign, a British and German import that was merely a passing fad in America.”203 In competition with European-influenced advertising aesthetics, a segment of the American advertising industry chose to stand by tested models and promote continuity, as expressed in both content and aesthetics. This view on traditional American advertising design was not simply a reaction to the new influences, but was also a result of the diversification of advertising and the formation of varied and parallel styles in a “period of reactions, extremes and reappraisals in advertising photography.” 204 As Sobieszek describes the era, “Consumers were dazzled and seduced, but they were also, at least in the minds of some advertisers, confused...” 205 A rather practical or conventional advertising aesthetic therefore persisted alongside more experimental advertising designs of the kind noted above in the CCA campaigns. This reflected the social and economic uncertainties of the crisis beginning in 1929 and the consequences of the worldwide depression and later war years; according to Marchand, this was symptomatic of the professionalization of advertising during this period:

202 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 86. [Original citation: “Based on the examination of approximately 180,000 ads as well as research into agency archives and other contemporary sources, Marchand’s study focuses on the development of national advertising in the 1920s, the decade in which it matured into a commanding cultural presence.”].

203 J.R. McKinney, “What Has Happened to Modern Art in Advertising?” Printer’s Ink Monthly 19, November (1929).

204 Sobieszek, Art of Persuasion, 65.

205 Ibid.

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Advertisers came to recognize certain vacuums of advice in modern society. They have always offered advice in a narrow, prescriptive sense: use our product. Now they discovered a market for broader counsel and reassurance. In response, they gave advice that promoted the product while offering expertise and solace in the face of those modern complexities…

Advertisers, then and now, recognized a much larger stake in reflecting people’s needs and anxieties than in actual circumstances and behavior.

It was in their efforts to promote the mystique of modernity in styles and technology, while simultaneously assuaging the anxieties of consumers about losses of community and individual control.206

The transformative element in the development of advertising, its modernity (an element which maintains its influence today), was rooted in the advertising industry’s capacity to anticipate and articulate the fears and desires of consumers: “This evolution toward an emphasis on consumer anxieties and satisfactions, which culminated by the 1930s, was what made American advertising ‘modern’.” 207 Like a number of its competitors, the Bettmann Archive succeeded in serving this market of anxieties and satisfactions and in satisfying its protagonists, the advertising designers who acted as the “guardians of uninterrupted success.” 208 The strategy of recycling historical pictorial material worked because the technological or social progress that the advertisement was promoting was highlighted by juxtaposition with a historical illustration, a past condition humaine. Thus, a substantial proportion of the advertisements for which the Bettmann Archive provided pictures functioned according to the pattern of “then versus now.” For example, although the polymath Athanasius Kircher had imagined the invention of a loudspeaker in the seventeenth century, it took modern radio technology to make his dream a reality. The reference to historical continuity suggested progress and also counteracted the scepticism and potential anxieties of consumers concerning the unbridled technological evolution and transformation of society. By using a historical image, whether drawn or photographic, either a promoted product or a magazine article could be imbedded in a visual and cultural frame of reference:

206 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 21–22.

207 Ibid.

208 Ibid., 2.

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You cannot deal with the future without tying into the past…Every novel idea, every flash of insight you have, can be communicated to others only in terms of the past – of the familiar – of things we all know about… To make the past help your future – that’s the purpose of the Bettmann Archive.209

Conclusion The Bettmann Archive supplied not only images, but also picture stories based upon historical imagery and image/text products; in addition, it sold ‘inspiration’ to editors, advertisers, designers, and artists, as highlighted in an advertisement for the Bettmann Archive, published around 1960: When you are stymied for the right idea to put your point across, or when you have the idea but lack the striking and unusual illustrations to capture your reader’s attention – come to the Bettmann Archive for help. Give us a theme and a little explanation of the idea you want to put across, and within 24 hours a package of prints and photos will be on your desk. This selection will be made by graphic experts who know your needs.210

Bettmann demonstrated an astute understanding of and sensibility for the different needs of his potential clients. The company was able to generate demand for historical illustrations and to provide products for a variety of uses, sometimes selling the same material for both editorial and advertising purposes. However, Bettmann was also familiar with contemporary trends and debates, such as social and political photo reportage, New Typography, and American Industrial Design, which helped him to anticipate and suggest modern uses for historical images. The use of historical imagery in magazines and advertising mainly facilitated the construction of a visual narrative or trajectory, adding an informational layer and certifying the relevance of the written text. It was the ability to cater to different needs and the versatility of the pictorial products that contributed most to the success of the Bettmann Archive. From the actual use of images in articles and advertisements (as well as from Bettmann’s affinity for contemporary graphic design and typography), the Archive’s understanding of the image as raw material becomes evident. An image was seen as a resource from which 209 Draft of a letter from the Bettmann Archive to its clients, ca. 1960, un-catalogued item, Iron Mountain Preservation facility.

210 Letter from the Bettmann Archive to its clients, un-catalogued item, Corbis Preservation facility, ca. 1960.

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individual elements could be extracted via photographic processing; however, this also led to a certain banalization and vulgarization of the images themselves. This process of vulgarization and the continuous de- and re-contextualization of an image, which really is at the core of its treatment as a commodity, will be further explored in the following chapter.

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4. Picture House: The Archive and Retrieval System By training, I seemed destined to plan the Archive like a library, offering quality pictures assembled according to a logical system.211

It’s hard enough to retrieve the retrievable.212

The development of an efficient archive213 and retrieval system was pivotal in Otto Bettmann’s enterprise. “Picture House,” a term used in the Bettmann Portable Archive, published in 1966, may be regarded as a pertinent metaphor for its significance.214 The archive and retrieval system represented the foundation upon which the collection was built and into which its content—the pictures and their various carriers, be they negatives, prints or other types of reproduction masters—were fitted. The Bettmann Archive was conceived and designed according to its archival matrix.

Contrary to news picture agencies, for which archiving was secondary – upon publication, the topicality of the pictures became obsolete – a commercial picture library, such as the Bettmann Archive, based on the recycling and recirculation of visual material, demanded and, at the same time, generated specific organizational structures. Archival functionality and efficiency were essential in order to ensure the continued use and dissemination of images. The analysis of these structures is the subject of this chapter.

When beginning to accumulate photographic reproductions, which later formed the capital of the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann Berlin, Bettmann simultaneously embarked on developing organizational structures that could serve as a basis for the expansion and commercialization of the collection. This system was, and still is, the key to searching and studying the collection, the key to the Picture House, and vital for its accessibility and interpretation. Bettmann’s application of his bibliographical knowledge and skills in library classification and the indexing of books to pictures may be seen as quite advanced for its time, especially in a commercial environment; he was

211 Bettmann, Picture Man, 57.

212 Bettmann Archive, Portable Archive, 81.

213 The term archive is used here as a synonym for an organizational structure of visual documents, which shares the features of all archives as defined by Aleida Assmann: selection, preservation and access.

214 Bettmann, Picture Man, 3.

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relentless in his bid to create a perfect archival organization that would be aligned to the demands of the commercial use of photographs, a system that would not only allow the efficient classification and retrieval of photographs as objects, but one that would also use photography as a medium of the archive.

However, as this chapter will demonstrate, the adaptation and combination of different archival and retrieval methods and the imposition of library methodologies onto pictures also, and unavoidably, entailed “disturbances, conversions, interruptions, confusions and readjustments.”215 Hence, the organizational mechanisms of the Bettmann Archive were subject to perpetual modifications, revisions, and aggregations. As a result, there was no single or universally adopted system that was in operation from the very beginning until the company’s sale in 1981. There were several variations that derived and then deviated from an ideal model. These variants led to occasional gaps or blind spots within the logic of the collection, that together with the lack of internal documentation limit the analysis.

The constitution of an archive always relies on the creation and the use of norms and standards. This chapter will investigate the concatenation of standardization of elements in the archive, from the conversion of varied masters into the photographic format through the index card the archival numbering and codification, the cabinet furniture and boxes to the systemization of captions and additional textual information. The intertwining or “convergence of photography, the archival paradigm and commodity capitalism”216 laid out in the introduction, is discussed in this chapter. Standardization was the precondition for developing working processes that allowed both Bettmann and the company’s employees to understand and to use the archive. Moreover, ‘the archive’ allowed for the transformation of a photograph into a commodity by providing access to the picture product, and by ensuring a continuous flow through the accumulation, supply, and circulation of these commodities.

The argument put forward here follows the thesis of mobility as a leading principle of the Bettmann Archive. The concept of mobile elements, was developed in chapter 215 Markus Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft. Die Geburt der Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2003), 10. [Original: “…Störungen, Wandlungen, Stockungen, Irritationen und Umlenkungen.”]

216 Frosh, Image Factory, 98.

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II.2.1 in terms of photographic reproduction and the use of the 35mm camera, and identified in chapter II.2.2 in connection with the iconographic content – the image as raw material from which individual elements were ‘mined’ and recycled. In this chapter it is discussed on the material level, in the processing and preservation of the photographic objects in the archive, as well as in the handling and administration of textual information.

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4.1 The Index Card: Searching, Storing and Displaying Evolution At the time the Bettmann Archive was created, index cards were widely employed for the development and organization of picture collections, both in institutional and commercial contexts. However, what distinguishes the Bettmann Archive from similar collections and commercial enterprises is not the actual use of the index card, but its role as the central storage and search mechanism. Bettmann’s concept relied on two major components: the conversion of a visual representation into text; and the combination of visual as well as textual information on mobile carriers – the index card.

As previously discussed, the descriptive and associative keywords attributed to the reproduced pictures, together with their caption and classification notes, formed the body of textual information necessary for both the recycling and commercializing of the photograph. In order to store this information and to make it permanently available and as fast as possible, an individual record in the form of the index card was created for each picture, for each negative accepted into the collection.

The card catalogue, as it survives today, can be divided into four series. In the beginning the cards were created consecutively; later, selected cards were transferred from one series to the next, pointing to the process of continuous selection of the circulating products.217 Given the fact that every bit of information on the index card, and its modification, had implicit ramifications for the classification and organization of the stock, it is necessary to provide a thorough, extensive description of the cards. Every change points to a minor or major event in the company’s development.

The first series, carrying the call numbers A-C (A.1.1 to C 23/23), consists of approximately 6,000 cards, all in German. With the beginning of the archive’s commercial activities in the early 1930s, Bettmann commissioned specially designed card

217 The card catalogue is also preserved at Iron Mountain, alongside various unclassified records, such as early handwritten registers and notebooks, newspaper clippings on the Bettmann Archive, and Bettmann memorabilia. There exists no documented evidence as to whether the extant card catalogue is complete.

However, the analysis of the card catalogue clearly suggests that the catalogue, consisting of the four series described in this study, represent the original, more or less complete corpus. The archival staff of Corbis supports this assumption.

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templates. In format218 and layout, these templates were reminiscent of ordinary library cards. However, they were adapted for a new use and conceived quite differently. In the template of this first series, the card was divided by a thin vertical line into two equal parts, as illustrated in the card example B. 35/23, entitled “Werkstatt eines mittelalterl.

Schreibers. Miniatur. K.K. Berlin” (Figure 32). The right-hand side was further divided into several fields that comprise the caption, the provenance of the picture resource (K.K. für Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin),219 the accession number (B.35/23), notes relating to the format of the master, and a field for additional remarks. The last, however, was left blank in most instances. The left-hand side combined the miniature photograph glued to the card, with the encoded main classification category K1i Handschriften (manuscripts) as well as several thematic keywords listed below the photograph in erasable lead pencil. In the lower left margin of the card, in sans serif type, was the phrase Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin, which inextricably linked the image and the card to Bettmann’s company.

Figure 32: First series, Index card B. 35/23, “Werkstatt eines mittelalterlichen Schreibers.

Miniatur. K.K. Berlin.”

Cardboard, ca. 1933.

When he emigrated to the United States, Bettmann took not only all his negatives and prints with him, but also, aware of its inherent value, this first series of the corresponding card catalogue. Given the restricted luggage limitations, this decision is noteworthy as it points to the important role that Bettmann attributed to the card catalogue in the organization of his collection. The cards were of equal importance to the negatives and print masters; they were a fundamental component of the company’s capital.

218 The format of the cards is A6.

219 “K.K., Berlin” refers to the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, see also chapter II.1.

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The second series of index cards (continuation of call numbers A-C and Pl)220 documents the realignment as well as the early expansion of the company with the resumption of its business activity, now in New York City. In his quest for the ideal homogeneous and functional archive and retrieval system, Bettmann assiduously experimented with the arrangement and content of the text fields, the card layout, and the writing styles as well as with different types of cards. In this, he was first confronted with the arduous task of translating the cards from German into English. Initially the translations of the captions and keywords were inscribed on the imported German cards.

Later, this practice was superseded by typing the English captions onto extremely thin paper, which was then trimmed and pasted over top the German captions (Figure 33).

In the case of an index card becoming too disorderly through the various annotations and affixations, it was completely rewritten. The translation of captions also affected their content, as they were shortened or rearranged in the English version. For reproductions of works of art, for example, the artist’s name, an integral part of the German captions, was moved from the title’s beginning to its end. In later series of the card catalogue, the artist’s name was entirely removed with the exception of a few prominent examples. The photographers’ or artists’ names gradually disappeared from the captions and metadata attributed to the image. The shift from assembling a collection of reproductions of art to a collection of images of all kinds, and the appropriation of pictures regardless their provenance, as discussed in chapter II.2.1, was reflected in the modifications of the textual data.

Figure 33: Second series, Index card B. 34/19, “Pain: Hands in painful convulsion, Detail from Grunewald, Isenheim Altar, Strassburg.” Cardboard, ca. 1936.

220 It remains unclear why the reference order changed from the alphabetical A, B, C order to the abbreviation Pl, nor what this abbreviation stands for.

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The production of English card templates, now bearing the name “The Bettmann Collection, New York,” led to several additional revisions, in particular with regard to the text fields as evidenced by the card B. 34/19, Pain: Hands in painful convulsion, Detail from Grunewald, Isenheim Altar, Strassburg, (Figure 33). In comparison with the first card series, in which the list of keywords appeared under the field of “Eventuelle Interessenten” (potential clients)221 in handwritten form, this field was renamed “Index” in the English templates. It was moved to the right-hand side and was no longer handwritten, but rather typewritten. Through these changes, the miniature photograph gained more space and prominence in the layout, that is to say the entire left-hand side of the card. The reverse side of the card was also subject to changes: anticipating the idea of a holistic commodity tracking, the German templates were designed to indicate the clients’ names and addresses, as well as the picture’s use and commercial success (Figure 34). However, these fields were eliminated in the English templates, as filling them had proved to be too time-consuming. The idea of using the card as a recording mechanism for administrative purposes was abandoned.

Figure 34: First series, Index card B. 34/19, “Grünewald, Händepaar vom Isenheimer Altar.” Detail of recto side, cardboard, ca. 1933.

The creation of the second series (the amendment of existing German cards and the introduction of the new English-language templates), comprising more than 20,000 cards, resulted in the first concrete revision of the original system. The changes and adjustments that were made from the German to the English card templates, along with the translation of the metadata, brought about the revision of fields, captions, and keywords, whether in terms of addition, removal, or reinterpretation.

221 The field Eveutuelle Interessenten (potential clients) is covered by the photograph in the example Index card B. 35/23 (Figure 1). In other examples this field is clearly visible, such as A.VI/27 Dürer: Das Rhinozeros, 155.B.136, Kl.d.K., or A.I./13 Am Schlagbaum. Zollverein. I. Hälfte des XIX. Jahrh. Silh.

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While the first and second card series, created between ca. 1933 and 1940, used specially designed Bettmann templates, the third series of index cards were devoid of predefined fields. The cards were completely blank (Figures 35, 36, 37). However, what becomes noticeable is that the processing of the card increasingly relied on simple ‘mechanized’ practices. From this time on, the card was predominantly typewritten, and stamped with the item’s accession number. The latter was first located in the upper centre of the card (Figure 35), it then moved to the upper left (Figure 36) and finally to the upper right (Figure 37). Compared to the previous examples, this third series, numbering approximately 10,000 cards, appears to be considerably pared down and simplified, particularly with regard to keywords, now handwritten again and condensed to a single word or two.

Figure 35: Third series, Index card 09820, “Travel equipment of a photographer around 1870/ Wood engraving.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

Figure 36: Third series, Index card 136-15, “Photography, Mr. Fenton’s Photographic Van, as used during the Crimean War.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

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Figure 37: Third series, Index card 09817, “Daumier, Honoré (1808–1879) Photography, Lithography from Nouveau Procede.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

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The fourth and last series of index cards (from accession number 592-01 on) displayed the most significant changes when compared it to its predecessors. The miniature photographic reproduction, a crucial element in the first three sets is eliminated from the card altogether. With these new cards, the arrangement of the keywords also changed.

As the example F. 8406 Fenton, Roger / Crimean War / Photograph shows (Figure 38), the keywords were no longer placed below or in any relation to the image, but listed horizontally in the heading line of the card. As such, the keywords gained considerable autonomy and importance, as they came to represent the most important information in the information hierarchy. They were the first element that the archivist would look at and, more importantly, the first element to look for.

Figure 38: Fourth series, Index card F. 8406 “Fenton, Roger / Crimean War / Photograph.”

Detail of front side, paper, ca.

1945.

While the card format remained unchanged, an additional and significant modification concerned the materiality of the card. Instead of using standardized cardboard cards, the company now used far less resistant paper cards, perforated on the upper as well as the lower edges. In this purely text-based card concept, the typewritten accession number (F. 8406) was placed on the left-hand side, the classification reference (34 J) on the right-hand side. With regard to figure 5, the index card, “Photography, Mr. Fenton’s Photographic Van, as used during the Crimean War” it becomes clear, that, in some cases, the card catalogue contained different versions of a ‘single’ image: the photographic reproduction of an engraving of Roger Fenton’s photographic van (Figure 36) and the 1855 photograph of Roger Fenton’s photographic darkroom van (Figure 39). This was especially true for details of paintings, such as the detail of Matthias Grünewald’s altarpiece (Figure 33) or Jean le Tarvenier’s engraving of Jean Mielot working in his scriptorium (Figure 32, “Werkstatt eines mittelalterlichen Schreibers”), images that were broken down into details, but also existed in their entirety in the collection.

While the first three card series totalled approximately 36,000 cards, the fourth version

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amounted to approximately 80,000 cards. This sharp increase in quantity ultimately points to and documents a burst in the expansion of the Bettmann Archive, making a simplified and faster creation and editing of the cards indispensable.

Figure 39: Bettmann Archive, Item F. 8406, “Roger Fenton’ photographic darkroom van used during the Crimean war, 1855.” Photograph, ca. 1940.

However, as the description of these four series shows, the Bettmann Archive, at this point, was far from achieving a homogenous and consistent practice or methodology.

Certain fields that had crystallized over the course of several years were abandoned, some were later reintroduced, and new ones were added.

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The functions: The index card as a tool for searching, storing and displaying To understand the elimination of the miniature photograph, and shed light on the reasons for the constant modifications and revisions of the index cards, it is necessary to examine the respective functions of image and text. The hypothesis put forward in this context is that, in Bettmann’s original concept, the index card was intended as a storage and search tool, but it also was to serve as a strategy for displaying the collection itself.

Storage tool As a storage device, the index card was meant to record all textual information, necessary for the commercialization of the photographic reproductions. As we have seen from the first card series, this was the case in the early years of the enterprise. The card was designed to provide not only the caption, the format of the master, its technique and provenance, but also the potential forms of exploitation and the commercial success that an image might have. In Bettmann’s original idea, the index card served as a condensed embodiment of the archive and of its administration. It was created and used to bring together what could not be done with or was not inherent to analogue photography: to present both the photographic image and its textual information on a single carrier. As with most non-book archival material, captioning the photographic object clearly has its practical and material limitations. Captioning the frame of a photographic slide, for example, or the reverse side of a photographic print is inconvenient and therefore often reduced to a minimum. With a few exceptions,222 the caption and additional text information of a negative, be it a glass or celluloid negative, is usually separate from the picture carrier; the accompanying text data is gathered and maintained in ‘satellite’ objects. It is usually found in registers, in inventory books, on paper sleeves, or other adjunct text recording material. One may argue that photography has the tendency of being rather resistant to its annotation. This material separation between the picture carrier and the information carrier means that, as an object and a medium of the archive, photography becomes susceptible to disruption and the loss of information engendered by the transmission and migration of data. The Bettmann index card, however, offered the possibility of combining the surrogate of the repro222 An exception is the so-called Autographic Kodak, a method through which it was possible to directly write onto the negative after image taking. It was invented by Eastman Kodak around 1915, but was not further developed. Many thanks to Patrick Peccatte for pointing this out to me.

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duction master – the miniature photograph – and its essential information on a single, neatly arranged and formatted information carrier. It also allowed viewing the visual and textual information at one consolidated glance.

Notwithstanding these obvious advantages, with the second series of cards, it became clear, that the meticulous elaboration of each individual card was far too laborious and time-consuming to be cost-effective and economically viable. Certain text fields were irrelevant for the commercialization of the pictures. Relying on art historical methods used for the description and organization of pictures that is to say the indication of the title, technique, format and provenance on the one hand mirrored the fact that the Bettmann Archive’s earliest collection comprised predominantly reproductions of art, especially etchings and paintings. For the commercialization of such pictures, however, the indication of artistic technique, format, and provenance was of secondary importance. Consequently, this information was eliminated from the subsequent card templates. In fact, very little information was truly indispensable: the title, the keywords, as well as the accession number and classification code. In contrast to captions employed in an institutional, research or educational context, the commercialization of pictures required an edited, carefully chosen and well-adjusted amount of accompanying information.

Search tool The fundamental function of the index card certainly consisted in its role as a tool for picture retrieval. The index card allowed access to the archival body. Both the classification code and the keywords referred to the various categories under which a particular photograph could be found and retrieved from the archive. As has been suggested with regard to the arrangement of the individual text fields, the development of the thematic classification system was far from being a linear process. In the first three card series, identified within the Bettmann Archive as the DEC-collection referring to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC),223 each individual picture was assigned to a single main category. In the examples shown so far, this practice is illustrated by underlining words such as Handschriften (Figure 32) Pain (Figure 33) or Photography (Figure

223 W. Boyd Rayward, “Melvil Dewey and Education for Librarianship,” The Journal of Library History, 3, no. 4 (1968): 297–312.

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36). The list of keywords, whether in manual or typewritten form, did not, as yet, refer to the classification of a negative or print into several sub-categories, but rather served as an internal means for creating pre-fabricated picture narratives, such as the picture features or timely features described in chapter II.2.3.224 The list of keywords rather functioned as a mnemonic device or inspiration for the promotion and commercialization of the collection. The latter may provide an explanation for the experimental mode of the various forms and arrangement of keywords.

The indexing and classification of the picture collection was guided by Bettmann’s knowledge and skills in librarianship. It was inspired by Minnie Earl Sears’ “List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries,” as outlined in chapter II.2.2, and – temporarily – organized according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Yet, for the management of a commercial picture archive, the simple application of organizational methods for books onto photographs was hardly suitable. The system needed to be tailored to the specific needs of Bettmann’s collection of images, and aligned to its ultimate objective: selling pictures.

This adaptation was brought about by the combination of visual and textual information, but its ultimate transformation came with the fourth and last card series: with the elimination of the miniature photograph, which resulted in a purely textual index card, the keywords were moved to the highest rank in the information hierarchy, to the heading line of the card. Instead of the designation of a single classification through the underlining and definition of a single main category, the picture was recast and henceforth assigned to several categories. Depending on a client’s needs, a photograph could now be found in more than one category and, thus, appear in multiple contexts.

It could, for example, be used as an illustration of Roger Fenton’s life and work, for information about the Crimean War, or illustrating the history of photography and its techniques (Figure 38). The commercial success and circulation of a picture was, therefore, highly dependent on the number of keywords generating multiple potential uses, or as Paul Frosh has critically remarked, a “parsimonious plurality of significations.”225 A picture’s richness and the often polysemic nature of images were reduced to a few 224 This assumption is supported by the fact that for some index cards an extensive description, consisting to up to approximately 150 words, was affixed on the reverse side. This text was part of the image/text product, described in chapter II.2.3.

225 Frosh, Image Factory, 98.

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words and by this contributing to the vulgarization of the picture’s content and meaning. With the use of keywords, varying between two and six in number, duplicates of index cards were produced in accordance with the number of keywords for any given picture. Hence, the multiple thematic classification generated not only several potential uses for an image; it also multiplied the archival material as such – that is, the number of index cards in the card catalogue.

Display tool In addition to its function as a storage and search tool, the index card had another objective: it served the visualization of the archive en miniature. By the synthesis of visual and textual information, it acted as a screen, a visual projection of the archival object. A promotional tool for the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin, the company’s business card from the early 1930s, supports this argument with its invitation to clients: “Besichtigung meiner Bildkartothek jederzeit erwünscht” (Visits to my picture card catalogue always welcome).226 In Bettmann’s original idea, clients were offered the possibility of visiting his home office, to ‘browse’ the card catalogue and make their own selection of pictures. Although this idea of a semi-public card catalogue was likely later abandoned, as suggested by the general ‘messiness’ of the index cards, the first three card series nonetheless offer evidence of such a direct approach.

The miniature photograph, accompanied by textual information, was meant to facilitate and accelerate the picture search. The photograph ensured that a particular image was truly relevant to the client’s request, without the need to either produce a print copy from a negative, or to cull an existing print from the filing shelves or boxes and then re-filing it. Given that numerous photographs existed only in the form of negatives until being requested by a client for the first time, the aim of the miniature photograph was to save time and money with picture search and retrieval. As complementary information, it was intended to compensate for the widely debated limitations of textual descriptions of a pictorial image. The miniature photograph guaranteed that an image was the right one; randomness was to be excluded from the picture search whenever possible.

226 This business card has also been inserted into the card catalogue; it carries the accession number: B. 14/1, but with no title or further inscription.

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The reasons for the elimination of the miniature photograph were both of a conceptual as well as of a practical nature. Apart from the effort involved in producing and affixing the photograph, it was subject to material constraints: over time the glue used for adhering it to the card weakened; the photograph fell off. As a result, adjacent cards stuck to one another, making them unusable and damaging the card catalogue as a whole. The effectiveness of the card catalogue relied upon and demanded standardized formats, accurately measured, from the individual index card to its container, the drawers and filing cabinets. This principle of standardization, however, demanded the exclusion of all manual additions, alterations, or variances, such as pasted elements alien to the system, as these impeded the proper functioning of the system.

When comparing Bettmann’s concept with one of the most prominent card catalogues combining image and text, that developed by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon,227 an additional conceptual “weakness” becomes apparent. In the framework of his anthropometric project for criminal identification, Bertillon created index cards for recording his measurements and the physical descriptions of his subjects. These cards consisted of a mug shot, that is a front and profile photograph, arranged in the center of the card, accompanied by annotations concerning the person’s age, height, eye- and hair-color, etc. (Figure 40). Bertillon’s use of the index cards is generally considered to be the precursor of today’s personal identity card.

227 For the use of photography for identification purposes and so-called Bertillonage, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 343–389; Christian Phéline, L’image accusatrice (Paris: Cahiers de la Photographie, 1985); Christian Phéline, “Portraits en règle,” in Identités. De Disdérie au Photomaton (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1985), 53–59.

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Figure 40: Alphonse Bertillon, Index card, “Mr. Galton 19.4.93, Nr. 277.” Cardboard, ca. 1893.

Viewed side by side, however, one could argue that Bettmann’s attempt at combining visual and textual information on mobile carriers, of creating the picture archive en miniature, eventually failed or proved futile because the combined functions and the benefits of the miniature photograph were limited. While facilitating the search for images, the photograph lacked conceptual ‘weightiness’. In Bertillon’s scheme, the visual information represented the primary source of information, but it played only a secondary or supporting role in the information hierarchy of Bettmann Archive and its retrieval system. Other examples of cards combining text and image, such as the museum accession card “Lens with which the pictures of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature were taken,” created around 1920 and currently preserved at the British National Media Museum, served as a documentation of the archival object.228 The record photograph was glued on the reverse side of the card (Figure 41). Moreover, cards incorporating image and text served as pages of product catalogues for clients, as illustrated by the “Roneodex” display system developed by the British design company Roneo in 1951 (Figure 42).229

228 Another, later example of the use of image/text cards in museums is the card catalogue for the photography collection of the George Eastman House, created in the early 1970s.

229 Catherine Moriarty, “A Backroom Service? The Photographic Library of the Council of Industrial Design, 1945–1965,” Journal of Design History 13, no.1 (2000).

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Figure 41: National Museum of Film and Television, Accession card, “Lens with which the pictures of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature were taken.”

Front and reverse side. In Finn, Presenting Pictures, 2004: 160.

Figure 42: Roneo Ltd. “Roneodex Filing System, 1951.”

In Moriarty, “A Backroom Service?,” 51.

However, despite these examples, it seems that only very few picture collections operated with a filing system of index cards combining image and text and, by this, using

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analogue photography as both object and medium for the archival organization. In the case of the Bettmann Archive, this type of card proved impractical due to the work involved in its production, the material incompatibility with standardized formats, and its limited functions in the commercial context.

In the commercial context, the advantages did not outweigh the effort put into its production, especially when dealing with vast picture collections. Furthermore, the downgrading of pictorial information on the card can be attributed to a simple, often overlooked fact: one does not search for the picture, but for the text associated with it; the textual metadata renders a picture searchable and retrievable.

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4.2  Classification and Preservation Classification Similar to the index card, the classification system was also subject to several revisions, yet, given the coding and general lack of internal documentation, these changes are far more difficult to reconstruct.230 Consequently, they can only be roughly outlined. For picture retrieval, two numbers or codes were crucial: the accession number and the classification code. In the first and second card series, the accession number consisted of one letter, starting with A, and two numbers, divided by a slash, for instance B. 35/23 or C. 54/7, etc. The numbers referred to the manual numbering of the film roll, such as roll 35 of the B series or roll 54 in the C series. The second number referred to the individual negative, such as negative number 23 or 7 of a film roll. Given that some masters were photographed several times before a satisfactory quality was reached, not every negative on the film roll was assigned a number or an index card as not every negative was selected for the body of circulating products in the Bettmann Archive. The thematic classification of a picture was also indicated by way of a code, for example K1i (Figure 32), denoting the category Handschriften (manuscripts), under which a reproduction master was to be found. The complete register of classification codes of the first and second card series, amounting to 24,000 cards, could not be found and likely no longer survives, rendering the analysis of the respective themes impossible. Partial records indicate the application of the Dewey Decimal Classification, yet, this system was maintained for a short time only, and applied to approximately 8,000 cards. With the third and fourth series, however, produced from 1940 on, the cards were arranged alphabetically. Hence, the card catalogue functioned as an index of the archive, a broad and eclectic agglomeration of themes, such as Meat & Butchering, Mecca, Medical, Medici, etc. or Phoenicians, Phonograph, Photographs: Old time, Photography, Photo: Caricature, Phrenology, Picasso, P. (Figure 43).

230  For example, the abbreviations DEC, Pl, F and SF refer to specific sections within the collection; their actual meaning, however, remains unknown to the Corbis archivists. However, this ignorance does not impair on the actual retrieval of the pictures.

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Figure 43: Bettmann Archive, “Card Catalogue in Alphabetical Order, ca. 1940.”

As mentioned earlier, the extant card catalogue suggests that the collection of the Bettmann Archive operated with a card catalogue during a limited period of time, for the first two decades of the company’s business activity. Pictures were selected and integrated into this system, but also discarded through the partial migration of cards.

With the expansion of the Bettmann Archive, however, and especially with the acquisition of entire picture collections and former agency stock, the card catalogue, a more or less homogeneous and consolidated archive and retrieval system, could no longer be maintained. Instead, the card catalogue created by Bettmann ran parallel to other ‘imported’ organizational systems. The purchased collections of former agencies and other private collections usually had their own methods of cataloging and classification, making the integration with and adaptation to the Bettmann system too complicated and laborious. Hence, these acquired systems were kept alongside the ‘main’

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catalogue of the Bettmann Archive and consulted separately. The vital link between these various systems was provided by the so-called “Category Book,” an hierarchical scheme of forty-six main categories that were divided and further divisible into numerous sub-categories, from AA to AZ, from AAA to AZZ, etc. The thematic category “Photography,” for example carried the code 34J. The various revisions of the classification codes of the main catalogue and the transformation to the sequence of the Category Book are documented on the front and reverse sides of the reproduction masters: old call numbers were crossed out and replaced by new ones. In some cases the new numbers were hand-written in black, in others in red. It was indeed the Category Book, a file with removable sections displayed in the company’s office that became the indispensable tool for picture search. It remained operational until company’s sale in 1981 and represented the informational grid of the Bettmann Archive.

Parallel to the index cards, the Bettmann Archive maintained a data backup, referred to as the company’s logbook, which provided a listing of the pictures by accession number, caption, and keywords (Figure 44). The early logbooks in particular were rigorously edited, and included photographic details such as the length of exposure, the aperture setting, and the distance of the camera from the object. Bettmann was an amateur photographer and these notations helped him to improve his reproduction technique. While the information contained in the logbooks became less detailed over time, they were nonetheless important for the safeguard of textual information and the long-term viability of the organizational system.

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Figure 44: Bettmann Archive,

“Logbook, ca. 1945.” Detail.

“

Storage and Preservation Compared with the efforts put into the storage and preservation of textual information, the preservation methods of the pictures themselves – the company’s capital – appear rather basic, perhaps reflective of the standards of the time. In the commercial context, the question of the original – in any case a highly disputed concept in terms of photography – was either irrelevant or handled pragmatically. If a negative was damaged or lost, a new negative was produced from a photographic print. The negative became the vehicle for preservation and the original was defined as the available picture source. The easy reproducibility of photography, its fluid character, therefore, undoubtedly alleviated the concerns about the preservation of the picture products.

What is noteworthy from an archival point of view, is the use and status of the 35mm negative, in particular with regard to the miniaturization of pictures through

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photography, an idea introduced in the chapter on reproduction photography (II.2.1) Exploiting the full potential offered by the small-format camera and the use of 35mm negative film was an obvious motivation in Bettmann’s concept. It allowed for the inexpensive and uncomplicated reproduction of library and museum holdings. The extraction of pictures from books or magazines or other picture carriers through photography and onto a roll film rendered the pictures mobile and reproducible. And with regard to archival storage, the 35mm negative was easily manageable in terms of its handling and storage requirements.

The introduction of celluloid nitrate film in 1889 and the development of the safer celluloid acetate film in 1925 not only revived the impulse for photographing ‘everything,’ but also prompted much discussion among libraries and other archival institutions, as outlined in relation to reproduction photography. The stock of the nucleus collection produced by the Bettmann Archive consists almost exclusively of celluloid acetate negatives.231 The celluloid negative (of any format) facilitated the everyday handling of the archival holdings, especially in comparison with heavy and breakable glass negatives as the latter required individual preservation in wooden or metal boxes, and a light-free environment.

From both an archival and commercial perspective, the use of celluloid film, and in particular the creation of a less flammable and arguably more stable chemical composition, had clear advantages for the Bettmann Archive, especially in terms of archival space. When comparing celluloid roll film with other types of negatives added to the Bettmann Archive through the acquisition of ‘foreign’ collections, such as the mounted colour diapositive or the glass-plate negative (Figure 45), the 35mm roll film offered a far more economic photographic carrier. The developed 35mm format was the smallest possible unit for storing and preserving a picture, while at the same time ensuring a satisfactory quality when enlarging and printing it.232

231 Corbis faced myriad problems with the conservation of the celluloid acetate and nitrate negatives. This aspect is dealt with in Part III. 232 For a discussion on the format used for reproduction photography, see chapter II.2.1. Although 16mm film was also used in reproduction photography, the 16mm format was impracticable for enlarging and printing photographs with an adequate quality. Interestingly, the limitation of the celluloid film, that is the overall instability of the celluloid acetate and triacetate were already known during the 1930s. Thus, it was clear that celluloid was far from being a permanent, or long-term image carrier. See, for example, Otto Mente, “Über einige Erfahrungen beim Photographieren mit Filmen,” Deutscher Kamera, vol. 18 (1927): 147–157, here: 149.

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Figure 45: Bettmann Archive, Bettmann collection 35mm negative roll film, ca. 1945 (left); Bettmann collection diapositve, ca. 1950 (top right); ACME Pictures glass negative, ca. 1920 (bottom right).

 

Figure 46: Bettmann Archive, 35mm negative roll film in transparent sleeve, ca. 1945.

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Assuming that the example above (Figure 46) corresponds to the original preservation method, the negative filmstrips were put in transparent sleeves and arranged in hanging cabinets. In this way, the entire stock of 35mm negatives was archived in no more than three cabinet shelves, measuring 1.5 metre in height and 0.5 metre in width. The material stock of the Bettmann Archive was astonishingly small in volume when compressed to a minimum. Bettmann remarked that visiting clients were often surprised by how small the company’s office and archival space was when compared to their expectations based on the collection’s reputation.233 At the same time, however, the use of roll film also gave rise to the accumulation of visual waste, a topic that has hardly been noticed or discussed in photographic history.

In the case of roll film, a photographic archive consisted not only of the selected negatives, but also those, which had been rejected. It is precisely in this respect that roll film differed from all other formats included in the Bettmann Archive: the mounted diapositive, the medium-format celluloid, and the glass negative. With 35mm roll film everything was preserved.234

233 Bettmann, Picture Man, 51. As Bettmann recalls: “People also tended to believe that the Bettmann Archive sprawled over a whole building at least – many even a whole city block. In fact, the collection was highly compact and organized rather than massive and, random accumulations of pictures.”

234 From today’s perspective, the preservation of unselected negatives, the accumulation of visual waste, is essential for the research on agency practices and the contexts of photographic production.

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4.3 From the Library to the Office Thus far, it has been argued that the importance given to the sustainable organization of the collection stemmed from Bettmann’s training as a librarian and his professional experience at the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett. The Bettmann approach may also be seen in relation to a more national and international preoccupation with photographic documentation and archival organization, such as Bertillon’s anthropometric project, Paul Otlet’s Répertoire iconographique universel235 (Universal Iconographic Repertoire) launched in 1906, or Franz Maria Feldhaus’ semi-public, semiprivate “Quellenforschungen zur Geschichte der Technik und Industrie”236 (Primary sources research on the history of techniques and industry) established in the first decade of the twentieth century. 237 Consequently, it is necessary to widen the explanatory framework. As discussed in Markus Krajewski’s work on the history of card filing systems, the imposition of library classification methods onto the organization of a commercial archive also needs to be examined in the context of the vast rationalization movements of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular with regard to the reform of information management and office administration. Bettmann’s system needs to be contextualized as a consequence of the “transfer of the card catalogue from the library to the office.”238 According to Krajewski, the transfer from organizational techniques developed for and used by libraries to their application in business administration occurred in the USA during the second half of the nineteenth century, and soon spread to a wide range of European institutions and companies. Central to the process was the American librarian and co-founder of the American Library Association, Melvil Dewey. Aiming for the universal standardization of library classification and knowledge transmission, Dewey 235 See note 36, Part II. 236 Markus Popplow, “Franz Maria Feldhaus – die Weltgeschichte der Technik auf Karteikarten” in Cut and Paste: Der Zeitungsausschnitt um 1900, Anke te Heesen ed., Kaleidoskopien 4 (2002); Markus Krajewski, “Der Privatregistrator. Franz Maria Feldhaus und seine Geschichte der Technik” in Bürokratische Leidenschaften.

Kultur und Mediengeschichte im Archiv, ed. Sven Spieker (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004), 295–318.

237 Some of these projects, such as Paul Otlet’s Répertoire iconographique universel or Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète were designed as world documenting projects. For the notion of ‘world-projects,’ which appeared around 1900 in a variety of contexts, media, scientific disciplines and reform initiatives, see Markus Krajewski, Restlosigkeit. Weltprojekte um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2006).

238 Markus Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft. Die Geburt der Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2003), 10.

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also established a for-profit company in 1877, American Library Association Supply Department. It was conceived as the commercial pendent to the groundbreaking Dewey

Decimal Classification (DDC) or Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) introduced one year earlier, in 1876. Renamed Library Bureau in 1883, the company manufactured and marketed a wide range of office and archival supplies: index cards, card boxes, filing cabinets, as well as forms and registers. Although primarily aimed at public institutions, it was soon delivering its products to private companies, as were other newly created companies in the field. The viability of the idea “to not only use card catalogues for economizing on time in libraries, but to address economic entities as such,”239 manifested itself in Library Bureau’s growing clientele which included insurance companies, banks, governmental departments and water, gas and electricity companies. Although Library Bureau’s endeavour to expand its business activities to Europe was, for a number of reasons, of limited success, the new methods for the organization of libraries and offices were soon flourishing in Europe, both in the institutional and private sectors.

Interrupted by World War One, the quasi-industrialization of organizational techniques was bolstered in the decade following the war. In Germany, numerous companies specializing in office supplies were founded after 1918, stimulated by the creation and increased distribution of various specialized journals such as Das System. Zeitschrift für Organisation und moderner Betriebsführung, (The System. Journal for organization and modern management), Organisation – Betrieb – Büro (Organization – Business – Office), or later periodicals, such as the 1926 Wirtschaftlichkeit (Operating Efficiency) and Zeitschrift für Organisation (Journal for Organization) founded in 1927.

A decisive element in the reform of information management was the standardization of index cards, which was based on a simple but effective principle: the storage of information on mobile carriers, a “triumph of mobility.”240 According to Krajewski, the index card allowed the storage of information on “independent, streamlined and flexible carriers…whose information, arranged in a strict organizational scheme, could be processed and easily retrieved.”241 The index card freed information from the rigid form of the register book, the dominant medium for the recording and storage of informa-

239 Ibid., 111.

240 Ibid., 154.

241 Ibid., 10. [Original: “Die Karteikarte ermöglichte die Speicherung von Informationen auf „gesonderten, gleichgerichteten und frei beweglichen Trägern… um nach strengen Ordnungsschemata arrangiert, weiter verarbeitet und abgerufen zu werden.”]

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tion, in favour of a more flexible, mobile memory, or externalized memory, facilitating insertions, expansion, and rearrangement. Systematic card catalogues had been in use in a number of contexts and for various purposes for centuries (specifically with Leibniz), but it was their standardization, the multifaceted application and marketing beginning around 1900, that transformed them into powerful instruments for information processing and control. An advertisement from 1929 declared that the index card was capable of functioning as a “register of clients, it can help with tracing orders…be used for retail and statistics, as a register for all purposes.”242 A universal office machine, the index card held out the promise of control over the handling of information, while saving time and effort.

It is precisely these two factors – the control of visual information and the economizing of time – that were critical for the success of photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries. The ever-expanding production of images led to the de facto interchangeability of pictures. The success of a commercial transaction was increasingly dependent upon the logistical services provided by an agency; the iconographic, aesthetic, and formal qualities of an individual photograph were no longer the only consideration for clients. This was particularly the case with news pictures, defined, as they were, by their topicality and the need for immediate and widespread distribution. In accordance with this demand, and for the sake of competitiveness, in 1941 the Bettmann Archive promoted the instant delivery of its products: It takes us exactly 60 seconds to check our files. Pictures available go out within an hour. A Boston client who called us at 9 a.m. had his prints at a conference at 12 o’clock. There was a special messenger to LaGuardia Field; a special messenger from the Boston airport; and the prints were in the client’s office in time. The secret of this rapid-fire service is revealed by the card index...This specialized index enables us to answer specific questions and assemble pictures in a very short time. Ordinarily such prints could not be collected without years of patient research.243

Bettmann was indeed familiar with the modernization of library systems and the development of a picture collection. He understood thematic indexation and cross-index242 Ibid., 154–155. [Original: “Kundenregister, zur Auftragsverfolgung...für den Verkauf und die Verkaufsstatistik...als Register aller Art.”] 243 Bettmann Archive ed., The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no.3 (1941), 6.

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ing, the uses and applications of index cards and various classification methods. However, the idea of an integrated information management system and the potential of the card catalogue as a record for administrative processes and as a display tool, reveal Bettmann’s entrepreneurial and management skills, and his astute grasp of the impact of a well-functioning archival organization on the company’s profitability.

The lead that the Bettmann Archive achieved through the intelligent organization of its stock vis-à-vis its competitors, becomes evident when comparing it to the card catalogues of other commercial picture providers, such as the Gendreau collection or of the agency International News Pictures (INP). Both are now preserved within the framework of the historical collections of Corbis. Neither the poorly maintained Gendreau card catalogue, nor the more sophisticated INP catalogue approaches the level of complexity of the Bettmann archival matrix. In the case of Gendreau, the handwritten annotations are noticeably heterogeneous, truncated, and sometimes even illegible.

While these shortcomings may be due to negligence, they may also suggest another purpose for the Gendreau card catalogue: perhaps it was not established with the recirculation of material in mind. It may have functioned as a complementary documentation of the stock, but not as the main search tool. What appear to be blind spots may in fact reveal that the catalogue’s use was strictly internal, set up and dependent upon the archivist’s knowledge, which would fill any gaps.

The card catalogue of INP, active from 1921 until 1960, operated with a less mobile structure. The INP cards were made of thick, solid carton and were far smaller in size that those used by the Bettmann Archive. Held in place and in sequence by a metal bar running through a hole at the lower center, the cards were fixed to the cabinet drawers. This structure helped prevent the loss of cards through erroneous filing and limited their material abrasion. At the same time, however, this method rendered the card catalogue less flexible. Adding new cards or making changes became more timeconsuming. Neither the Gendreau card catalogue nor that of INP offered a combination of text and visual information, and neither operated with multiple keywords and crossindexation, essential for the recycling and re-contextualization of the pictures.

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4.4

Ideal vs. Reality

Notwithstanding the various material and practical constraints that the Bettmann Archive, like any archive, library, or museum encountered, the librarian and ‘picture man’ undoubtedly dreamed the dream of an ideal archive, of an ideal index card reflecting an ideal, flawless order. In an article, entitled “Picture Index” 244 written by Bettmann and published in the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians in 1939, Bettmann promulgated the functionality and superiority of his company’s archive and retrieval system.

Figure 47: Bettmann Archive, Model index card C 54/7 “Mielot, Jean: Miracles de Notre Dame.” In Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, 1939: 536–537.

The index card used to illustrate the article (Figure 47) may have perfectly corresponded to Bettmann’s original idea. However, it remained only a model, an unrivalled and unique prototype. The extant card catalogue does not contain such cards; it does not contain such thoroughly filled out and accurately edited examples. The discrepancy between the ideal card and those produced and used in everyday practice becomes clear when comparing the model card with the several ‘real’ card versions of the same picture, such as B. 35/23 „Werkstatt eines mittelalterl. Schreibers” or its English-language version B. 35/23 “Workroom of a manuscript writer and illuminator of the Middle Ages.”

Bettmann’s vision of reducing ‘everything’ onto the small format of an index card and of using it as an externalized memory, as a search and storage tool capable of also visually representing the archive, had apparent limitations. As Markus Krajewski aptly

244 Otto Bettmann, “A Picture Index,” Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, April 1939. The Wilson Bulletin for Librarians was published between 1914 and 1995 and widely distributed in the USA among library professionals.

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put it with regard to the history of card filing systems: “It seems inevitable, to read the history of the card index as a history of manifold failure.”245 This was principally due to the size of the Bettmann Archive collection.

In the five years following its re-establishment in New York in 1935, the company’s stock of images had increased approximately six-fold. While the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin had consisted of about 6,000 pictures with corresponding index cards,

by the end of the decade, the collection had risen to ca. 36,000 entries. Judging from the fourth card series and the relocation of the company’s premises, the Bettmann Archive continued to expand rapidly in the subsequent ten years, augmenting its stock to approximately 116,000 photographs.246 In order to develop and organize the influx of pictures as efficiently as possible, the textual information was gradually modified and reduced, as we have seen from the evolution of the card catalogue. The miniature photograph was eliminated, captions were condensed, the card became less complex, information was typewritten and numbers stamped, or also typewritten. These modifications and the reduction in informational density point to a dichotomy that principally affects all commercial picture libraries or photographic agencies, then and now. One the one hand, they need to assign as much information as possible to their products in order to ensure a proper and profitable circulation; on the other hand, this information must be reduced to the essentials. It is precisely on this point that commercial collections differ from their institutional counterparts, which – in theory – aim to provide more comprehensive information.

Reflecting the organization of the Bettmann Archive itself, the index card served for the systematization and standardization of information, yet the very format of the card led to a calculated reduction and even loss of both visual and textual information for the sake of simplified processing. The principle of reduction for a more efficient processing also became manifest with regard to the materiality of the card itself. The material of the first three card series consisted of relatively robust, yet flexible carton

245 Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft, 13.

246 As mentioned earlier, the size of the Bettmann collection had not been documented. The estimation provided here is based on the approximate size of the card catalogue. The forth set of index cards amounts to ca. 240.000 cards, contained in two registers, with a total of 32 drawers. The rapid expansion of the collection is furthermore suggested by the increase in size of the office and archival space, as outlined in chapter II.2.3.

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paper. This standard material was resistant enough to tolerate the repeated manipulation of the cards as they were taken out and returned to their files. The cards were not easily torn, eventual typing or spelling mistakes could be erased and rewritten, and the paper was sturdy enough to handle additional elements being affixed to it. The ca.

80,000 cards of the fourth card series, however, were considerably lighter in weight. The thin material was less firm and therefore prone to abrasion. The perforations on the top and bottom side furthermore suggest that this cards series consisted of tear-off cards.

Instead of being created or edited individually, these tear-off cards stemmed from a roll of paper. These paper-rolls were fitted into the typewriter, and filled in sequence, in a single working step, and stamped with the accession number of the image described.

The continual bursts of expansion during the first two decades of the Bettmann Archive required a constant revision and reduction of archival practices in order to accelerate the processing of the ever-increasing number of new pictures. The index cards also bear witness to a modest but steady process of mechanization. This process of mechanization – from the manually written annotation to the typewritten form, from the elaborated template to the tear-off paper card – had an obvious goal: defining the card index as a “machine,”247 its aim was the mechanization of the archive and the retrieval system itself.

However, if certain aspects of the archive and retrieval system were mechanizable, the creation and maintenance was by no means and at no time automated. It relied upon the manual efforts of Bettmann and his employees, and by extension, their knowledge and rigor. With the sheer masses of new pictures added to the collection and especially with the acquisition of several ‘foreign’ collections, maintaining a flawless archival order became increasingly difficult. Inevitably, the system became susceptible to errors and heterogeneity. The multiplication of the stock multiplied the risk of potential errors. This fragility, or what scholarship has characterized as the “in/ discipline of the archive,”248 points to the discrepancy between the notion of a quasiautomated, ideal (and idealized) archive and the actual practice of the archive, especially in a commercial environment.

247 Krajewski points out that a card catalogue not only possesses all logical components of a “Universale Diskrete Maschine” (universal discrete machine), but that it also corresponds to the definition of theoretical kinematics. The latter characterization is supported by the capability of the individual elements of being reordered and re-combined. Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft, 14–15.

248 Gillian Rose, “Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 555–571, here: 564.

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4.5 “One word is worth a million pictures” and the Bettmann Portable Archive The archive and retrieval system of the Bettmann Archive was determined by the richness of detail, formed by the keywords and thematic categories, in its encyclopedic index. This is why the extensive list of categories, the company’s index, played such a crucial role in promoting the Bettmann Archive and attracting new clients. “One word is worth a million pictures” – with this telling slogan the Bettmann Archive promoted its services and quality in an advertisement published around 1955 (Figure 48). In contrast to the practice of most photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries, the Bettmann Archive did not advertise its most prominent images, but rather presented extracts of its index (see its purchase order form, Figure 49), which also served as a promotional tool for the Bettmann Archive.) While the Archive comprised 200 thematic categories with 10,000 reproductions in 1936, the number of categories had increased to 10,000 with more than 1,000,000 pictures by 1961.249 The aim was not to have as many pictures as possible for any single category, but to have as many categories as possible in order to further the vision of an encyclopaedic picture collection, a “vast collection of photographic reproductions recording man’s progress in every art, profession and trade – in all countries – in all ages.”250

Figure 48: Bettmann Archive, “One Word is Worth a Million Pictures.” Illustration by Bernard Bloom, imprint on cardboard, ca. 1955.

249 “Dr. Bettmann and his Picture Archive,” Publishers Weekly, December (1961) [no author credited].

250 Bettmann Archive, The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no. 3, May 1941.

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Figure 49: Bettmann Archive, Purchase Order Form with Index. Imprint on paper, ca.

1955.

The promotional index presented clients with an initial orientation to the collection and marked the quality that distinguished the Bettmann Archive from its competitors and from the public libraries and other institutions whose non-exclusive visual holdings Bettman was offering for sale. Through its research, screening, and re-evaluation of the images and the creation of a complex classification system, the Bettmann Archive claimed superiority over similar picture agencies. Despite the “uniqueness”251 of the available pictures, the prices, ranging from $5 to $500, were no higher than the usual rates for news or contemporary stock photography.252 The distinctive characteristic of the Bettmann Archive, and the key to its success, depended upon both the stringent selection of relevant historical illustrations and the instant retrieval of the photographs.

251 Bettmann Archive, The Bettmann Archive Newsletter, no. 4 March 1942.

252 Ibid.

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The Bettmann Portable Archive In addition to the various promotional material, the Bettmann Portable Archive was conceptualized as a more representative catalogue, a showcase for the Bettmann collection represented in “a mere 3,669 pictures,” and the first volume of a projected series that would create an “Encyclopaedia Iconographica.”253 Published in 1966, this portable version of the Archive was meant to inspire, to convey knowledge about the past and to be “a window in the house of pictures.”254 In contrast to the trade catalogues produced by stock photography companies in the 1970s and later, the Portable Archive was addressed to both a professional audience and to the public at large.255 The Bettmann Portable Archive is indeed noteworthy as it epitomizes several issues and themes discussed throughout this chapter.

A 230-page cloth-bound book, the Bettmann Portable Archive presents 185 miniature picture histories, arranged alphabetically by catagory from A (Absurdities) to Z (Zoology). The list of main categories is enhanced by a subject index, consisting of more refined keywords and a so-called idea and image index, which refers to the “symbols, sayings, human qualities and abstractions,” depicted by the company’s picture products. The categories and ideas selected are an eclectic accumulation of words and images, that do not follow any specific rule, e.g. there are picture histories for Greece, Italy and Japan, but none for other countries. However, the selection was not arbitrary: The diversity of categories for objects, actions, geographical places, concepts and people was intended to allude to the riches and the depth of the Bettmann collection.

Each of the main categories (such as Pain, Paper, Paris, Patents, Peddlers, Perfumery, Pharmacy) is represented by a carefully selected combination of reproduced art works, graphic illustrations, cartoons and photographs; these are featured on individually designed pages, arranged in image rows or integrated into a specific graphic design idea.

Let us (again) have a closer look at the Photography category: the theme is presented on two pages, juxtaposing Walker Evans’ photograph “Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia, 1932” on the left page (Figure 50) with a miscellany of twenty-nine miniature pictures on the right page (Figure 10). These smaller pictures depict a variety of different types of photographic techniques and cameras, including the Eastman Kodak

253 Bettmann Archive, Portable Archive, 2.

254 Otto Bettmann, interview, 1971. See note 4, Part II. 255 Bettmann, Picture Man, 135.

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box camera, captioned with the famous slogan “You push the button,” (no. 2831); pictures on aerial photography; a tintype photographer, entitled “Tintype Man in Hyde Park, London” (no. 2824), a stereoscopic viewing device (no. 2821) and “Daguerre’s first camera” (no. 2817), etc. The page also displays situations of image taking, varrious uses of photography from aerial reconnaissance to portraiture and William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype “The Ladder,” abbreviated here as “Early Photo (Talbot)” (no.

2838). In the middle of the page we see a graphic abstraction of a camera aperture that reinforces the theme of photographic focus in the layout. Each image is accompanied by a short caption (often reduced to one or two words) and a reference number, which enables the reader to find and order the image. As has previously been noted, names of photographers and artists are rarely indicated. A reflection of the business practices of the Bettmann Archive, the photographic reproductions were considered to become the property of the archive once a collection was purchased or reproduced. This logic of appropriation is further demonstrated by the fact that the Bettmann Portable Archive was protected under the US copyright law by an official request from the company. One of the first pages clearly states, “No material may be reproduced…without the payment of the required fee”256 – the copyright protection applies not only to the book as a whole, but also to the graphic design and to each individual image.

256 Bettmann Archive, Portable Archive, 2.

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Figure 50: “Photography Category, Walker Evans’ ‘Penny Picture Display.’” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966: 160.

Another issue that is reflected in the Bettmann Portable Archive concerns the equal treatment of picture resources. Images, whether high art or popular art (or not art at all) are treated in exactly the same way; some are displayed in miniature format, while others are enlarged, depending on the layout of the page and the narrative intention.

Images are cropped, cut out and re-assembled in collages; details are sometimes hard to discern. The images were used as expedients for developing narrative idea, and they were quite literally understood and used as illustrations; they were Gebrauchsfotografien and as such were meant to serve as an inspiration for art directors and designers. In effect, the Bettmann Portable Archive was a resource book. So, what does the picture history on photography tell us about photography? One interpretation, although certainly not the only one, envisions photography as a history of techniques: Daguerre’ first camera, photographic chemicals, photographic plates, developing procedures, etc.

By combining Evans’ photograph of the shop window of a small-town portrait studio with pictures evoking the social function of photography, photography is also characterized as a popular mass medium, even as a democratic medium. However, despite the diversity of picture resources, the level of information provided remains rather superficial due to the lack of any text or information that could enlighten us about the

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contexts and meanings of the images and the connections between them.257 Wit regards to its concept and organization, the Bettmann Portable Archive stands in the tradition of trade catalogues, and in particular mail-order catalogues. A marketing tool developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, mail-order catalogues produced by retail companies such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward in the USA, Eaton in Canada, and Manufrance and La Redoute in France, promoted a variety of goods ranging from clothes, books and furniture to pre-fabricated houses: as the Montgomery Ward catalogue of 1895 claimed, they supplied “for every trade and calling on earth.”258 An effective strategy to expand market reach and sales volume, mail-order catalogues depended heavily on visual representations, either hand-drawn illustrations or photographs. As can be seen in the examples from the Eaton 1917 Fall/Winter catalogue (Figures 51 and 52) and an sample from the 1931 Manufrance catalogue (Figure 53), the products ­– here “smart hats for girls,” men’s clothes and wall decorations, such as Kodak photo frames and genuine oil paintings – were accompanied by a product description and arranged according to a more or less distinct graphical scheme. A striking parallel between mail-order catalogues and the Bettmann Portable Archive is the notion of selection: the represented products were advertised as a small selection of the available products; they were, as indicates the example from Manufrance indicates “some of the ‘specimen’” of a wide spectrum of products. The rhetoric of selection for such a “great wish book”259 implied both quality (in the sense that only the best products were represented) and a far greater availability of products beyond those listed in the catalogue.

257 Cheryce Kramer indirectly compares the Bettmann Portable Archive to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas; in my view, this is a highly problematic interpretation. As demonstrated in connection to the concept of subject eyes and subject pictures, Bettmann’s approach was very different from that of art historians.

258 Nick Lyons, ed., Montgomery Ward & Co., 1895 Catalogue and Buyers’ Guide, reprint, (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008).

259 Ibid., back cover.

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Figures 51: Sample from the Eaton Fall/Winter catalogue, “Girl’s Hats,” 1917.

Figure 52: Sample from the Eaton Fall/Winter catalogue, “Wall Decoration,” 1917.

Figure 53: Sample from Manufrance catalogue, “Men’s Suits,” 1931.

The picture histories found in the Bettmann Portable Archive can also be seen as part of a long-standing practice of publication that Bettmann developed as an offshoot of and complement to his company’s primary business. Beginning in 1939, Bettmann published several books and booklets of visual histories using images from the collection, including the Pictorial History of Medicine, the Pictorial History of Music, The Good Old Days; They were terrible!, The Bettmann Archive Picture History of the World, and a series entitled Educational Forum Portfolios. These publications were directed towards the general public, with an emphasis on their educational value; however, they did not fail to make clear that the pictures included could be acquired via the Bettmann Archive. Thus, the Archive’s motivations oscillated between academic, or popular science aspirations and pragmatic business practice. The subtle line between visual historiography and sales promotion, between an educational (or epistemological) tool and a product catalogue, proves to be particularly blurred in the case of the Bettmann Portable Archive. The title itself, with its contradictory idea of a portable archive – implying mobility and flexibility on the one hand and an institutional concept (or Denkbild) bound to a specific location on the other – characterizes the intentions and business

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philosophy of the Bettmann Archive quite accurately. It can be argue, that the books created and published by the Bettmann Archive resulted from Bettmann’s deep-seated conviction (as a librarian) that pictures, like any other cultural expression, needed to circulate. Just as “music not performed ceases to exist”260 and “art not seen loses its meaning,”261 in Bettmann’s view, pictures needed to be re-activated and re-interpreted; they needed to be ‘performed’ in order to continue to exist.

Conclusion From the analysis of the archive and retrieval system(s) of the Bettmann Archive the following can be concluded: first, the card catalogue, and in particular the first two cards series, bear witness to Bettmann’s academic approach and methodological thinking, which rooted in his training as both art historian and librarian. The captioning, indexing, and classifications relied on methods developed for libraries or for the documentation and management of museum collections, though, for the latter, no universal standard model exists to this day.262 It was informed by methods employed at the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, among others, operating with multiple keywords for the description and organization of art, and eventually inspired by the general preoccupation with the efficient organization and management of various kinds of archival collections during the first decades of the twentieth century. Second, Bettmann’s approach was driven by the idea of using photography to allow an improved access to the collection and, by this, using photography as an archival device in its own right. It was also driven by the idea of moving from an exclusively textbased to a pictorial organizational system. This idea, however, proved impractical and was abandoned. Third, the use of card catalogues by the Bettmann Archive and other photographic and commercial picture agencies of the time emphasized the primary function of these companies as the management of visual material. Like many firms in 260

Bettmann Archive, Portable Archive, 3.

261 Ibid.

262 For the discussion on the various attempts for the standardization of captions and the classification of art works, in particular in the context of museum management, see: Christine L. Sundt, “The quest for access to images. History and development,” Advances in librarianship 22, (1998): 87–106; Matthias Bruhn, “Die unsichtbaren Wörter,” in Das abc der Bilder, ed. Moritz Wullen (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2007), 22–25. A noteworthy systemization project for the thematic classification and indexing for images, in particular art works, putting into practice the idea of (art) historical iconography, is Iconclass system developed by the art historian Henri van de Waal in the early 1970s. See also Matthias Bruhn, “Die unsichtbaren Wörter,” in Das abc der Bilder, ed. Moritz Wullen et al. (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2007), 22–25, here: 23.

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other fields, such as insurance companies and banks, photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries increasingly made use of modern techniques of archiving, information management, as well as business administration. What becomes evident is the editorial authority of the respective company and its archivists and its impact upon the interpretation of a picture. They decide, almost exclusively, on the length of the caption and the choice of keywords. Finally, the duality of an academic-institutional approach and a business-oriented practice, which characterized the archival organization of the Bettmann Archive, nourished the development of an effective archive and retrieval system. This duality figured significantly in the success of the company. However, the evolution and multiple revisions of the index cards reflect not only the conflict between an academic-institutional approach and a for-profit enterprise, one based on the principles of economic efficiency, but also the variance between the theory and the practice of the archive.

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Chapter 3 “Either you grow or you go” – Towards the Aggregation of the Market

In 1961, the Bettmann Archive, which now contained approximately 1,000,000 pictures and employed a staff of five, moved to the Tishman Building, a newly constructed office building in Uptown Manhattan. While this move into more modern and spacious offices reflected the company’s vitality and its growth from a one-man company into a mid-sized enterprise, it also marked a turning point.

Thus far, the Bettmann Archive had specialized in providing clients with historical imagery, but now it was forced to adapt to the fact that photography had become the leading picture medium; no longer merely a tool for reproduction, photography was now also a means of producing ‘autonomous’ pictures and had become the leading medium for documentation and illustration of all kinds. In response to this changing environment, the Bettmann Archive acquired large photographic collections and former agency stock, “entire photomorgues”263 including the Gendreau collection on Americana and the John Springer collection (specializing in film and celebrity portrait photography), both purchased in 1967. In 1971, it negotiated the licensing rights for the Underwood & Underwood collection;264 of particular interest here were the collection’s news pictures, which the Bettmann Archive distributed on a commission basis. Through such acquisitions, the Archive’s stock grew sharply, adding stacks of historical and recent images to its vast stock of photographic reproductions. In the case of the Gendreau collection, however, Bettmann objected that its purchase had not effectively added a more modern facet to the existing stock, as the collection was static, “neither old enough to fall within my own collection nor current enough to qualify as truly contemporary.”265 The acquisitions followed a basic principle: “either you grow or you go.”266 In order to remain competitive in the market, the Bettmann Archive had to expand in order to be able to fill as many potential requests as possible. This was also connected to the rising demand for colour images, as suggested in a 1973 promotional

263 Bettmann, Picture Man, 101.

264 The Bettmann Archive negotiated the licensing rights for mining the news picture segment of Underwood & Underwood, covering the period between 1900 up to the Second World War. 265

Ibid.

266

Ibid, 93.

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letter from the Bettmann Archive to prospective clients: Things you never knew about the Bettmann Archive” the fact that many of the more than 4,000,000 pictorial artefacts in our vastly expanded quarters here at 136 East 57th Street are now also available in color. Correct.

Color…But then, in the early 1970’s, coincident with the demands of color television and color roto (newspaper) sections, we were offered a chance to purchase some outstanding private collections.267

The Bettmann Archive increasingly sought to acquire colour photographs for its collection, and also reproduced in colour or (in some cases) hand-coloured a selection of particularly popular images. As the quotation above indicates, in addition to print media, television had become an important sales market. However, the sharp increase in stock exacerbated the effect described in the section on the complexity of the archive and retrieval system: each acquisition necessitated the integration of a foreign, often inferior classification system into the archive’s existing organization, gradually undermining the complexity of Bettmann’s original system. This dilution of complexity was an inevitable consequence of the Archive’s response to its clients’ demands for an everincreasing number of images and its own attempts to stimulate demand.

Acquisitions and technological advances compelled the company’s core business and organizational system to adapt; the evolution of the archive was also due to new market trends, above all the emergence of contemporary forms of stock photography and the formalization of the stock market during the 1970s. As several scholars have noted, in the 1970s the picture market separated into two distinct fields: agencies concentrating on the supply of news pictures, and stock agencies targeting the advertising industry.

While no single point of origin for stock photography can be identified, in the 1970s a wide range of advertising photography began to be produced “prior to any assignment, as a sort of speculative image-making.”268 Stock photographs were pictures conceived as “visual condensations of verbal concepts,”269 filed and cross-referenced according to general categories and concepts such as People, Business, Leisure, Friendship, Landscape,

267

Letter from the Bettmann Archive, dated April 13, 1973; un-catalogued item, Corbis collection.

268 Miller, “Pictures for Rent, 128.

269 Ibid., 128.

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Worried, Happy, Successful, etc.270 These pictures were taken with their multiple use and re-use in mind, as readily available stock for advertising clients; this in turn generated a particular aesthetic, a stereotype associated with stock photography.271 In one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject, in particular on the intersection between stock photography’s mode of representation and its cultural economy, Paul Frosh proposes a periodization for the phenomenon: he demarcates a primitive era before the 1970s, during which only small agencies concerned themselves with stock photography and its potential was unexploited, and a classical period, in which the stock agencies developed into a more “unified industry and a subject of discourse…formulating a recognisable, consensual visual aesthetic manifested in the ‘generic stock image.’”272 Frosh further delineates a modern period starting in 1990, a period “characterized by rapid and radical fiscal, organizational, and technological change.”273 The Bettmann Archive could be categorised as a primitive form of a stock agency, but one that took a quite different approach in the creation of generic images. An analysis of the Archive’s transformations of art reproductions into ‘subject pictures’ and its ahistorical treatment of pictures demonstrates that ‘meaning’ (in the form of text information) was easily modifiable and constantly modified. On the one hand, information irrelevant to the commodification of an image, such as its provenance, photographer, or artistic technique, was often removed. On the other hand, the picture was given new or additional meaning by the attribution of keywords and by its classification. The objective of this de- and re-contextualization was the multiple use and re-use of the image, its recycling for various editorial or advertising purposes. Bettmann’s approach shows that the concept of multi-usage images could be applied to any visual representation, be it a painting, drawing, or photograph. This supports Bruhn’s thesis that the creation and use of Fertigbilder (‘ready-made images’) did not start with the invention of photography

270 See here the art work by Jeff Guess “Bank of Nature: Concepts,” La Vitrine de la Société française de la photographie, Paris, 2007 271 For more detailed studies on the concept of stock photography as an aesthetic genre and a business model that emerged in the 1970s, see the work of Miller, “Pictures for Rent,” 1996; Frosh, Image Factory, 2003; Bruhn, Bildwirtschaft. 2003; Sobieszek, Art of Persuasion, 1988; James Ong, Photography Best Seller: One Hundred Top Moneymaking Photos (New York: Moore & Moore, 1987).

272 New companies including The Image Bank and Comstock, both founded in 1974 became synonymous with the stock photography market aesthetics of generic images.

273 Frosh, Image Factory, 26.

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or stock photography; rather, they can be found throughout the history of art.274 Frosh is perfectly right in underlining the dramatic changes created by stock companies that focused on providing services for the advertising industry, introducing aggressive sales techniques and applying the concept of worldwide franchises along the way. However, another, often-overlooked factor also affected developments in the picture market: the large-scale introduction of electronic data processing in the mid1970s, which further accelerated the commodification of photography.275 Similar to the impact of the introduction of the card catalogue on the effectiveness of modern business administration and organization during the 1920s, the shift towards computerization and electronic forms of data processing had great impact on the operations of photographic agencies and commercial photo archives. While it would be beyond the scope and capability of this study to retrace the nascent computerization process and its impact on the functioning of photographic agencies and commercial photo archives, it is important to bear in mind that this process did not begin with the emergence of companies such as Getty Images and Corbis in the early 1990s, but was already well underway twenty years earlier.

Like many other photographic agencies, the Bettmann Archive was aware of the need for more efficient information management, especially with regard to its proliferating stock. Consequently, the company’s new offices in the Tishman Building looked “more like IBM than an archive.”276 Electronic typewriters, computers, and databanks gradually replaced index cards, card catalogues, and hand-written registers.277 In a 1972 interview, however, Bettmann indicated that compared to other companies with “enormous industrial and capitalistic facilities,”278 the Bettmann Archive had only very limited financial and technical means for transforming the company into a “modern” operation. Bettmann’s semi-retirement as the company’s director in 1975 might thus be 274 Bruhn, Bildwirtschaft, 2003. The term Fertigbilder (‘ready-made images’) was coined by Matthias Bruhn and Pablo Schneider, “Fertigbilder. Allegorien des Alltäglichen,” in Kritische Berichte 2 (1998): 32-43.

275 Examples of early automation projects for the management of library data can also be found in the institutional sector. Sponsored by IBM, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York launched its first electronic data-processing project in 1956 to improve the management of the museum’s research library (later renamed the Thomas J. Watson Library, after the founder of IBM and trustee of the Museum from 1951 until 1956). See the Library’s website http://libmma.org/portal/library-history/.

276 Bettmann, The Picture Man, 94.

277 John F. Baker, “Living in the past with Dr. Otto Bettmann,” Publishers Weekly, November 25, 1974, 24-25.

278 Otto Bettmann, interview, 1971. See note 4, Part II.

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interpreted as the first sign of the company’s decline.279 Would the Bettmann Archive be able to maintain its position in the future? How could it survive vis-à-vis the increasing globalization of the picture market?

In 1981, Otto Bettmann retired completely, selling his company and its collection of approximately three million pictures for an undisclosed amount to the publishing firm Kraus-Thompson Organization, which later merged the Bettmann stock with the photo collections of United Press International (UPI) and Reuters, increasing the total collection to over sixteen million objects (including duplicates). Tellingly, Kraus-Thompson did not change the Bettmann Archive’s name, despite its takeover and relocation into new offices and even though it had been merged with the significantly larger UPI collection.280 From the 1980s onward, the stock, including numerous “iconic images from the 20th century”281 as well as photographs dating back to the 1860s, was marketed under the names “The Bettmann Archive” and (for the photo-journalistic branch) “Bettmann News Photos.”

Investigation of the history of Kraus-Thompson from the acquisition of the Bettmann collection in 1981 to its sale in 1995 proves highly difficult, as the company has since been liquidated.282 However, interviews with former employees carried out in the framework of this research revealed that Kraus-Thompson was alarmed by the state of

279 Bettmann’s stepson Melvin Gray (from his marriage with the antiques dealer and interior designer Anne Clemens in 1938) took over as the managing director of the Bettmann Archive in 1975. Bettmann subsequently divided his time between New York and Florida, where he became affiliated to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. However, the sources suggest that he continued to be involved in the business operations of the company.

280 Founded in 1953, UPI is itself a conglomerate of several photographic agencies including ACME (19231960) and INP (International News Pictures, 1912-1958).

281 See Corbis Film Preservation and the Bettmann Archive factsheet, updated 2007, http://www.corbis. com/corporate/Press-Room/PressFactSheet.asp. Similar sentiments have appeared in several articles, including Mary Battiata, “Buried Treasure,” Washington Post Magazine, May 2003: “millions of the greatest images of the 20th century;” Dirck Halstead, “A Visit to the Corbis Picture Mine,” The Digital Journalist, June 2003, http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0306/cpmine.html: “a vast proportion of the world’s visual legacy;” Scott Williams, “Freezing Time,” Washington CEO Magazine 15, no. 5 (May 2004): 69–70: “the most famous pictures in history.”

282 Founded in 1947, Kraus-Thompson established itself as an academic publisher, distributing (among other products) journals and books to college and university libraries.

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conservation of the Bettmann and UPI collections.283 Large parts of the original collection, in particular the celluloid acetate negatives and polyester prints produced after 1950, were in the process of deteriorating and thus demanded special care. Former employee and collection conservator Els Rijper, who had joined the company in 1984, reported that since Kraus-Thompson had neither the financial means nor the technical know-how for the appropriate conservation of the collection, it began negotiations with potential investors in the late 1980s. According to Rijper, additional motivation for Kraus-Thompson to consider the sale of the Bettmann Archive arose from the fact that “everyone” in the publishing sector was fully aware that the industry was yet again being challenged by radical technological changes that could be summarized by the term ‘digital media.’ These changes would undoubtedly require significant investments, and Kraus-Thompson, like many others, felt ill-equipped to weather this transition without impairing the quality, depth, or scope of its collection.

283 Interview with Els Rijper, employee at the Bettmann Archive from 1984 to 2001, carried out on April 19, 2010. Rijper was responsible for the preservation of the archival holdings and picture research at the Archive, and has published a book on the visual history of Kodachrome: Els Rijper, Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World, 1939-1959 (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002). Another essential source of information for this thesis was Kenneth Johnston, director of the historical collections at Corbis, interviews conducted in March 2009 and April 2010. Johnston began his career in 1989 at the Bettmann Archive, while it was owned by Kraus-Thomson; he has co-authored a book on the history of American news picture agencies, in particular UPI: William Hannigan and Kenneth Johnston and, The Rise of American News Pictures (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).

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Part III Corbis, or the Excess of the Photographic Archive (1989–present)

In 1995, the Bettmann Archive changed hands for a second time; in contrast to KrausThompson, the new owner Corbis had no a priori knowledge of the functioning of the picture market. Often referred to as a “visual content provider,”1 Corbis was created in 1989 by Microsoft founder and owner William H. Gates under the name Interactive Home Systems (IHS) to specialize in the commercialization of digital imaging. Otto Bettmann himself approved of the purchase of his former company, claiming to be pleased “to have seen my original acorn nourished and cultivated into a formidable digitized oak.”2 Bettmann praised the potential of digital archiving: “picture seekers no longer have to consult a multiplicity of sources to fill their graphic needs; all can be satisfied in one well-organized picture emporium,”3 thereby reaffirming not only his pragmatism but also his indifference towards photographic materiality.

The first chapter in Part III will focus on the emergence of visual content providers during the 1990s, most notably Corbis and its main competitor Getty Images, and on the development of the Corbis collection. In this context, I will examine the idea of the enhanced mobility and mobilization of images through their reproduction, as well as the recurring theme of immateriality with regard to the digital form of photography.

The underlying argument here is that the commodification of images has been drastically accelerated with every major technical development in photographic methods in terms of storage and dissemination, creating new standards, new markets, and new networks. The advent of companies such as Corbis and Getty Images has radically reconfigured the picture market. However, these companies have also imbedded themselves in the very philosophy and history of the market, which can thus be characterized by continuity rather than rupture. The second chapter will centre on the conse-

1 This term features prominently in the self-portrayals of both Corbis and Getty Images and points to the fact that the two companies distribute not only still images but also film. In this chapter, however, I will only address analogue and digital photography.

2

Jesse Birnbaum, David Bjerklie, and Patrick E. Cole, “Gates Snaps Top Pix,” Time, October 23, 1995.

3

Bettmann, Picture Man, 144.

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quences of the transition from analogue to digital photography in the framework of the picture market, using a very concrete example: the digitization and commercialization of the historical collections of Corbis, in particular the Bettmann Archive. In addition, this chapter will shed light on the challenges and difficulties that Corbis encountered in the creation of a digital image product and a viable business model. Building on recent scholarship that has critically investigated the multiple material manifestations of photography,4 this second chapter will introduce the idea of materiality as it relates to the digital form of photography and will examine how digital materiality shapes and is shaped by the archive. In connection to the main thesis of Part II and the Bettmann Archive, it will be argued that the value of a digital reproduction is determined not only by the image content, but also by the effort and labour exerted on behalf of the image and related metadata and by the form that is given to the image. Finally, the implications of the economic paradigm for management of vast, if not excessive digital collections will be described and linked to the intrinsic relationship between the idea of ‘collecting everything’ via (digital) reproduction, the search for ever-more efficient archival structures, and the ambition to make the process profitable.

4 The notion of the material turn in photography was introduced and discussed in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Nina Lager Vestberg, “Archival Value,” Photographies 1, no. 1 (March 2008), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540760701786725.

The analysis of the form and function of photographic objects is, of course, not a new subject in the history of photography, but rather a recurring topic. Most recently, photographic materiality (including its contemporary forms) was the subject of an exhibition at the Maison Européene de la Photographie entitled “L’objèt photographique, une invention permanente,” Paris, April–June 2011.

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Chapter 1 The Emergence and Development of Visual Content Providers 1. The Dream of Immateriality The invention of digital imaging reanimated the dream that has infused photography ever since its earliest days: the fantasy of collecting everything, of accessing “enormous collections of forms…classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes advocated in regard to stereoscopic views.5 To facilitate the development of such collections, Holmes suggested the formation of a “comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes.”6 Like Holmes, Paul Valéry applauded the economic potential of photography and its site-less and time-less reproducibility; in his 1928 essay “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” he stated: “like science, it [the reproduced work of art] becomes an international need and commodity.”7 Understood in relation to the development of an increasingly democratic process, Valéry explicitly connected the advantages of mechanical reproduction to the empowerment of the individual. Liberated from the location of its performance and its temporal continuum, mechanical reproductions would enable the individual not only to access and participate in the experience of art, but also to choose when and where to do so. In regard to the visual experience of reproduced images, Valéry concedes that “we are still far from having controlled visual phenomena to the same degree” due to the limitations of image reproduction, meaning photography, in contrast to the reproduction of sound: “Color and relief are still rather resistant. A sunset on the Pacific, a Titian in Madrid cannot yet be enjoyed in our living room with the same force of illusion as a symphony.”8 However, Valéry envisioned that

5 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859), reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 71–82, here: 81.

6

Ibid.

7 Paul Valéry, “La conquête de l’ubiquité,” Œuvres. Pièces sur l’art, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960), 1283–1287, here: 1284; first published in De la musique avant toute chose (Paris: Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1928); [Original: “Telle que la science, elle devient besoin et denrée internationaux.”]. English translation: The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 225–226.

8 Ibid. [Original: “Nous sommes encore assez loin d’avoir apprivoisé à ce point les phénomènes visibles.

La couleur et le relief sont encore assez rebelles. Un soleil qui se couche sur le Pacifique, un Titien qui est à Madrid ne viennent pas encore se peindre sur le mur de notre chambre aussi fortement et trompeusement que nous y recevons une symphonie.”]

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various types of reproductions would soon spread into the private space, individually programmed, to “satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort…at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign,” and as basic as “water, gas, and electricity…coming to our houses from far off.”9 The comparison of a reproduced work of art and, by extension, a photograph with utilities reaffirms the reproduction’s character as a product of the mass consumerism of 20th century society; however, it also emphasizes its notional status as a vital, ubiquitous element of modern life, in particular for the modern (bourgeois) individual whose home is equipped with standard amenities such as running water, gas, and electricity, and who listens to the radio, takes photographs, leafs through illustrated magazines, plays records, and attends movies. “I do not know,” Valéry continues, “whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.”10 The creation of a distribution service for images, Valéry’s “home delivery of Sensory Reality,”11 simulating and satisfying the alleged needs of modern society and of the modern individual is precisely what Gates envisioned when founding IHS in 1989, though in a very different context. In contrast to Valéry’s vision, the universal accessibility and the shift of the experience of art from the public to the private sphere in Gates’ scheme was clearly intended to turn a profit.

In his book The Road Ahead,12 published in 1995, Gates elucidates his vision of an information society and his motivation for creating IHS. The chapter “Cyber-Home” presents the construction plans for Gates’ own private home, which was designed to be equipped with “news coverage and entertainment at the touch of a button.”13 An individual choice of images, recordings, films, and TV programs were to be displayed on several synchronized wall monitors. Gates specifically mentions photography: as the first private user of a “databank of a million pictures” comprising photographs and photographic reproductions of art, he imagines a “unique and comprehensive archive

9 Ibid. [Original: “Comme l’eau, comme le gaz, comme le courant électrique viennent de loin dans nos demeures répondre à nos besoins moyennant un effort quasi nul, ainsi serons-nous alimentés d’images visuelles ou auditives, naissant et s’évanouissant au moindre geste, presque à un signe.”]

10 Ibid. [Original: “Je ne sais si jamais philosophe a rêvé d’une société pour la distribution de Réalité Sensible à domicile.”]

11 Ibid., see note 10, Part III (above).

12 Bill Gates, with Nathan Myrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).

13 Ibid., 257.

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of images of all kinds.”14 With the help of wide-ranging data registers, these images were intended to be easily retrievable. In contrast to most photographic agencies and commercial image banks that primarily targeted the media, publishing, and advertising industries, the IHS business model was additionally designed for a highly powerful group of customers: individual consumers.

It is precisely this juxtaposition between the liberation of experience on the one hand and its privatization on the other that is illustrated in the digital painting by Louie Psihoyos, “The Information Revolution, 500 Monitors” from 2003 (Figure 54).

Situated in the very centre of a panoptic structure, we see the dark silhouette of a person in front of a white, glaring light, comfortably leaning back in a chair. Conveying an atmosphere of leisure, the person is surrounded by a grid of colourful, brightly illuminated screens. While the image suggests a maximized visual experience, the boundaries between entertainment and control, monitors and monitoring, and the observer and the observed are blurred. Thus, the work may be interpreted as corresponding perfectly to the Zeitgeist that has been increasingly pervasive since the early 1990s: the idea of the ultimate transformation of everyday life facilitated by the progress of communications technology and its electronic apparatuses.15 As predicted by David Bearman in 1995, the “growing penetration of interactive, broadband services into homes, schools and businesses and the emergence of a facility for information and entertainment will be of an importance equal to that of television today.”16 At the same time, intentionally or not, Psihoyos’ juxtaposition of countless images and the shadow of a viewer represents a critique of this concept, especially when comparing the 500 monitors with the image of a panopticon (Figure 55), such as the Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba. The panopticon was conceived in such a way that a prison warder in the central tower could observe the detainees without being seen, thus imposing the ultimate pre-emptive control.

14 Ibid.

15 The effects of the emergence of digital media on 1990s culture and society have been discussed most prominently by Nicolas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Boston: MIT Press, 2001); and Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998).

16 David Bearman, “Standards for Networked Cultural Heritage,” Archives & Museum Informatics 9, no. 3 (1995): 279–307, here: 279.

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Figure 54: Louie Psihoyos, “The Information Revolution, 500 Monitors.” Digital painting, 2003.

Figure 55: Panopticon, “Prison building at Presidio Modelo, view from the inside. Isla De la Juventud, Cuba.” Photograph, 2005.

The critique of Valéry’s idea of the ubiquity of the aural or visual experience reflected in “The Information Revolution, 500 Monitors” has further resonance in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In the mentioned 1928 text “This space is for rent,” part of the essay collection One-Way Street, Benjamin claims that the “insistent, jerky nearness” and “special ubiquity of things” – here referring to advertising and film – “make criticism impossible,” as “criticism is a matter of distancing. It [criticism] was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint.”17 What made the digital form of photography so appealing to anyone involved in the archiving and the management of collections in both commercial and institutional contexts, for whom constraints of space, time, and money were ever-present prob-

17 Benjamin, “This space is for rent,” 85–86. [Original: “Kritik ist eine Sache des rechten Abstands. Sie ist in einer Welt zu Hause, wo es auf Perspektiven und Prospekte ankommt. Die Dinge sind indessen viel zu brennend der menschlichen Gesellschaft auf den Leib gerückt.” in Walter Benjamin, “Diese Flächen sind zu vermieten,” [1928], in Walter Benjamin, Medienästhetische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 198.]

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lems, was the idea of its immateriality. The digital image was understood as an image without a physical carrier, reduced to a binary code, an image “produced without the intermediaries of film, paper or chemicals.”18 The economic potential of digital imaging as well as other forms of photography relied precisely on this: the idea of immateriality and enhanced mobility. As Holmes suggested in 1859 in his plea for the sales potential of stereoscopic views, “Form is henceforth divorced from matter.”19 The anticipated potential of analogue photography lay in substituting an object with an image, thus obviating the immobile and expensive form of the object depicted in a photograph. The same reasoning was applied to digital imaging: while the digital reproduction of an image was not considered the equivalent of the original photograph, its quality was adequate and it could therefore be rendered marketable. Additionally, since the picture market, in contrast to the art market for photographs, deals not with the photographic object but with the intangible rights for reproducing, using, and publishing the image, the shift from analogue to digital was interpreted as a mere continuation of existing practices. Digital imaging promised to be a further step in the continuous search for greater efficiency in reproduction techniques and in the management and exploitation of images. Thus, it was assumed that in comparison to analogue material, digital reproduction would be more mobile and inexpensive and as such would inevitably replace its analogue predecessor. Just as photography superseded previous reproduction techniques (most importantly, lithography and engraving and the related businesses) during the early 19th century, a new digital market with new rules would emerge and would eventually replace existing businesses.

The idea of immateriality and enhanced mobility was so powerful that it “captured the imagination of the cultural heritage community” 20 and private companies alike.

Numerous institutions and private companies involved in the archiving of collections sensed the opportunity not only to reduce the volume of their collection by preserving digital surrogates, but also to earn income from their digitized holdings. In the future, a picture archive or any archive would be, as Corbis imagined, condensed into a deserted room equipped with data servers, with shelves, boxes, and folders replaced by

18 Joanna Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in Edwards et al., Photographs Objects Histories, 186.

19 Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 80.

20 Jennifer Trant, “The Getty AHIP Imaging Initiative: A Status Report,” Archives and Museum Informatics 9, no. 3 (1995): 262–278, here: 262.

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machines and pictures by electronic data; this idea of immaterial and mobile data was visualized in the abstract form of a spinning red light in a publicity image of the Corbis Computer Center (Figure 56).

Figure 56: Christopher J. Morris/Corbis, “Data Computer Center at Corbis, Bellevue.”

Photograph, 2001.

Accompanied by a widespread debate on their impact on knowledge production and the dissolution of ‘the archive’ as an authoritative body,21 advancements in digital imaging led to major financial investments and the emergence of new business ventures. Most of the players in the traditional picture market, primarily photography agencies and commercial image banks, were hesitant or simply did not have the financial means or the technological know-how to invest in digital technology; however, the possibilities of digital imaging were considered so promising that they attracted companies entirely new to the picture market, including Corbis and its principal competitor, Getty Images.

Referring back to the quotation by Janos Reizmann that opened Part I, a parallel may be drawn to this contemporary phenomenon: the development of a new photographic (and reproductive) technology held the promise of a potentially lucrative business and functioned as a magnet for investors and speculators. This latter point seems particular pertinent with regard to Corbis and Getty Images, as they were investing in a yet-to-beoptimized technology and an undeveloped market.

Drawing on the idea of immateriality, the business model of the IHS distribution service was based on two assumptions: First, it relied on the hypothesis that the ‘information highway,’ whose infrastructure in the early 1990s was still rudimentary, would 21 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Édition Galillée, 1995).

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soon allow for the transmission and reception of large amounts of data, including images. This technological development would automatically stimulate demand and create a desire for digital images and would subsequently generate new marketing opportunities. Many feared that IHS would benefit from this infrastructure by installing “a tollgate on the information super highway.”22 Indeed, by investing heavily in digitization and the technology for storing and disseminating images, IHS sought to control the anticipated stream of digital images. The fear of an image monopoly seemed justifiable, given the dominance over the world’s personal computers that the Microsoft Corporation had previously achieved through its operating systems.23 Second, Gates believed that “just as software had replaced hardware as technology’s most valuable product, so too would content eventually replace instruction sets as a basis of digital value.”24 Digital content, be it visual, aural, or textual information, would become the capital of information technology – and this capital needed to be amassed.

For Corbis and Getty Images, the imperative of the subsequent years was the accumulation of as much visual material as possible in order to establish a comprehensive collection of images: as Corbis described it, a “digital Alexandria” or an “Encyclopedia Britannica without body text.”25 The company’s aim was to be “the place for pictures on the Internet,”26 assuming that there was a clearly defined number of images worth owning. The development of a particular grid of categories and keywords, creating a “gridded territory,”27 determined the images needed to build this place. In the words of Allan Sekula, this place was a “territory of images”28 composed of potentially profitable images; in view of the prospective clients, it was a place dominated by American and Western visual regimes and visual histories. To distinguish itself from existing photographic agencies and image banks, the Corbis collection would function like a depart22 Jane Lusaka, Susannah Cassedy O’Donnell, and John Strand, “Whose 800-lb Gorilla is it? Corbis Corporation Pursues Museums,” Museum News, May/June (1996): 34–37 and 76–79, here: 37.

23 Microsoft’s policy regarding operating systems culminated in the highly publicized 1998 trial United States v. Microsoft, in which the US government conducted an investigation into Microsoft’s monopoly power.

The trial undoubtedly contributed to Corbis’ negative image.

24 Richard Rapaport, “In His Image,” Wired Magazine 2, no. 11 (1996), http://yoz.com/wired/2.11/features/ corbis.html.

25 Ibid.

26

This sentence refers to a promotional slogan on the Corbis website from November 1999.

27 Gillian Rose, “Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, some Photographs and a Researcher,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no.4 (2000): 555–571, here: 564.

28 Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 443–452, here 444.

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ment store or a shopping mall (one of the markers of twentieth-century consumer culture), allowing the client to find everything in one place, thus saving time and effort.

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2. Banking on Images: The Corbis Collection In the early 1990s, Corbis negotiated non-exclusive licensing rights with many photographers and a number of museums and libraries to market their collections; partners included the Barnes Foundation, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Smithsonian Institute, the Seattle Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Carnegie Institute, the archive of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Planning, and also non-American institutions such as the British National Gallery and the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Corbis, as its former director Steve Davis explained, was “interested in different types of works from around the world” and thus approached a number of museums “based on the nature of the collections, or because of their interest in working in digital technology.”29 The non-exclusive rights agreements would allow Corbis to create digital reproductions and distribute them to private consumers as well as to publishing and advertising professionals. Museum collections seemed particularly appealing, as they represented a pre-selection of acclaimed artworks certified by the authority of the cultural institutions and thus promised to be valuable and profitable. In turn, many museums, especially smaller ones, were actively seeking cooperative agreements with private or institutional partners at the time, as they were aware of the need to engage in the digitization of their holdings for promotional and editing purposes, as well as for recordkeeping and conservational needs.30 Benefits for the museums from the arrangement were partly financial, as the profit generated was to be shared with Corbis, but also resulted from the indirect promotion of their collections.31 However, many museums balked or gave their consent only for a very limited period of time, as they feared a loss of control over the use of their holdings, especially given that copyright legislation had yet to be adjusted to reflect the rapidly changing technological developments. The primary concern of photographers and institutions was 29 Lusaka, et al., “Whose 800-lb Gorilla is it?” 35.

30 Ibid., 78. It should be noted here that, compared to most European cultural institutions, American museums and libraries have always been heavily dependent on private funding, as they receive little or no governmental support. This explains Corbis’ attractiveness for these cultural institutions. Today, the American model of public-private ventures in the cultural field is also widely implemented in European institutions.

31 Patricia Failing, “Brave New World or Just More Profitable?” Artnews, no. 9, October (1996): 114–118.

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that Corbis initially claimed a separate copyright protection, arguing that the digital reproduction of an artwork or photograph could be considered as fundamentally distinct from the original. Potentially, by adjusting the colour, brightness, or contrast of a photograph, the digital reproduction could be interpreted as a unique work of art. In addition, museums feared that Corbis would take possession of and commercialize and vulgarize a wide range of artworks in the public domain. The company countered these allegations by stating that the copyright protection it claimed applied only to the digital image, the visual surrogate of the primary material produced by Corbis, and argued that it was not preventing anyone from reproducing and subsequently disseminating the same work of art.32 The company undoubtedly capitalized on the general confusion about “who owns what version of what”33 and the broader debate in the early 1990s on the authenticity and validity of digital records. The efforts by Corbis to cooperate with public institutions were highly controversial in part because they “forced the non-profit cultural sector – libraries, archives and museums – to think carefully about whether and how they can position themselves to earn income from their digitized holdings or reach popular audiences.”34 Corbis and also Getty Images to some extent were criticized for challenging not only the authority of public institutions as cultural repositories, but also their non-profit status.35 However, as the history of Corbis shows, the accumulation of “virtually anything imaginable”36 proved to be more difficult than anticipated.

From 1995 on, the year that Corbis adopted its name,37 the company was forced to reconfigure its business model to confront the issue of rights and economic realities in its attempts to achieve a leading position in the picture market. As one might expect,

32 Lusaka, et al., “Whose 800-lb Gorilla is it?” 78; See also Barbara Hoffmann, Exploiting Images and Image Collections: Goldmine or Legal Minefield? (London: Kluwer Law International, 1999).

33 Lusaka, et al., “Whose 800-lb Gorilla is it?” 77.

34 David Bearman, “The Challenge of the Acquisition of the Bettmann Archive by Corbis,” Archives & Museums Informatics 9, no.3 (1995): 261. See also Bruce Upbin, “Image Enhancement,” Forbes, March 1 (2004): 58–60.

35 Because of the market-dependent nature of government grants and philanthropic contributions, public institutions in the US are increasingly reliant upon funding streams from offering additional services, such as the scanning of library holdings, museum gift shops and restaurants, and venue rental for private events. See also note 30, part III. 36 Bearman, “The Challenge,” 261.

37 The name Corbis is derived from the Latin corbis, meaning ‘basket.’ The choice of this name can be interpreted as a reference to the ‘shopping cart’ that would later become the icon of electronic commerce. Prior to adopting this name in 1995, IHS had been renamed Continuum Corporation in 1994. The repeated change of the company’s name is an indicator of the difficulties Corbis encountered with the establishment of its brand during the early 1990s.

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the concept of a separate copyright, the legal divorce from matter and the appropriation of images using the digital medium, was not viable. Amassing visual content by means of cooperative agreements with museums and photographers proved to be too complicated and time-consuming and was soon abandoned. The new strategy was the acquisition of myriad photographic collections and the takeover of a wide range of photography agencies and commercial picture libraries (Figure 57).

Figure 57: Corbis website, Array of collections distributed through the Corbis website.

Screenshot, March 25, 2009.

Corbis’ strategy was to cover a variety of subject areas, including fine arts, entertainment, science and technology, and political, social, and cultural history. In 1995, it purchased the Bettmann Archive, which had previously merged with UPI and which itself was an amalgam of various collections (including ACME, INP, and Pacific & Atlantic).

In 1996, the holdings of the French agency Sygma, with a corpus of approximately 40 million images, were added, as well as those of various smaller collections. In addition to the accumulation of material stock and entire businesses, which alleviated problems of copyright, Corbis also established several commission contracts for mining pre-digitized private and institutional collections, among them parts of the prints and photographs collection of the Library of Congress, the publishing house Condé Nast, the Alinari Collection, the estate of Ansel Adams, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Acting as a flagship brand, Corbis also increasingly invested in stock photography. In 1998, it purchased Digital Stock Corporation and later acquired the stock photo agency Veer, both of which offered images very inexpensively under a royalty-free licensing scheme.38 The company also bought Outline Press Syndicate, which specialized in

38 Royalty-free is a widely established non-exclusive licensing scheme by which the payment of a one-time fee allows a client to use an image multiple times and for multiple purposes.

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celebrity portrait photography, and founded Greenlight, a company focused on image rights services, namely rights clearance, tracking, and administration.

Getty Images, founded in 1995 by Marc Getty and Jonathan Klein, followed a similar strategy. In its development and acquisition policy, it can be regarded as a mirror image of Corbis. The two companies competed for supremacy in the picture market, although Getty Images took the lead for various reasons.39 Often mistakenly assumed to be connected to the Getty Institute or the Getty Museum, Getty Images laid the foundation for its operations by acquiring the leading stock photo agencies Tony Stone Images (1995) and The Image Bank (1998), a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company with more than 70 sales offices in 40 countries, as well as many other thematic collections. With the purchase of the Liaison Agency in 1997, which also cooperated with the French agency Gamma, the company acquired a vital source of photojournalistic material. In addition, it invested in PhotoDisc (1998), a stock agency specializing in royaltyfree images and electronic distribution, and the company iStock Photos (2006), which distributed images mainly for Internet applications. It also obtained vast quantities of historical photographs by purchasing the Hulton Deutsch Collection in 1996 from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); this primarily consisted of the collections of the former photo agency Keystone and the British illustrated magazine Picture Post. In contrast to Corbis, which was privately held, Getty Images was publicly traded on the American stock market until 1998.

Interestingly, both Corbis and Getty Images consciously sought out and purchased historic collections of 19th- and early 20th-century photographs in an attempt to recycle visual history and to exploit the vague notion of collective memory. Enriched by the process of time, these photographs were considered highly valuable. They broadened the collections and provided the companies with credibility. With digitization, these historical photographs gained an added market value – the digital form, and the ability to be used and re-used in new and different ways, the “re-use value”40 of images.

39 The history of Getty Images is certainly deserving of its own study. There are several reasons for Getty Images’ leading role in the market. Compared to Corbis, Getty Images focused from the very start on the customary clients of the picture market, namely the publishing and advertising industries. Like Corbis, Getty Images also distributed historical imagery via the Hulton Deutsch Collection. However, it did not invest in lengthy negotiations with museums and libraries, limiting retro-digitization to a small number of particularly promising pictures instead of attempting the digitization of entire collections. As a consequence, Getty Images avoided or minimized the problems arising from the editing, indexing, and merging of collections.

40

Jenny Tobias, “Re-use Value,” Cabinet 22 (2006): 44–47.

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Indeed, through digitization these photographs were integrated into a new economic cycle. Moreover, in order to flesh out its thematic grid, photographers hired by Corbis set out to systematically capture images of potentially profitable objects, themes, and sites that were missing from the collection. For particularly promising subjects, various views and combinations were photographed: for example, the Eiffel Tower in all seasons, by day and by night; as a close-up, panoramic, or aerial view; with one person, two or more, or with crowds of people; in black-and-white and in colour, etc. These contemporary photographs were added to the previously purchased photographs of the Eiffel Tower under construction, portraits of its engineer, and drawings and paintings of the Eiffel Tower over time. This ‘bulimic appetite’ for images was whetted by photographic reproducibility, the idea of the immateriality, and the capitalist principle of continuous growth. As Elizabeth Swan, the chief librarian at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia recalls, “Initially Corbis wanted only selected images from selected classics. The more they saw, however, the more they wanted. Then they wanted all the images from the selected classic.”41 The ultimate aim of Corbis’ world-documenting project was to become a company that would be hard to avoid, or, as Corbis put it, “The range of the company’s visual content attempts to encompass the breadth of civilization, containing everything from reproductions of cave drawings to contemporary celebrity photographs.”42 Its motivation was purely commercial, yet it was draped in a vocabulary that had accompanied photography since its beginnings. Photography, as early enthusiasts marveled, was capable of bringing to us “hieroglyphs from Thebes, Memphis and Karnak,”43 alongside artworks from the Louvre, water from the Seine, pavements, and the sky,” all things big and small, permitting the collection of all riches and treasures. 44 Photography suspended time and space; it leveled miscellaneous representations, from cave drawings to celebrity portraits, into one all-encompassing narrative.

According to Corbis’ corporate statements, the company today represents the work 41 Lusaka et al., “Whose 800-lb Gorilla is it?” 76.

42 Tina Gant, ed., International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 31 (St. James Press, 2000). Partly accessible through http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/c.html.

43 Dominique François Arago “Rapport de M. Arago sur le daguerreotype. Lu à la séance de la Chambre des Députés le 3 juillet 1839, et a l’Académie des Sciences, séance du 19 août.”

44 Jules Janin, „Le Daguerotype“ [sic], L’Artiste, [1838–1839], in André Rouillé, La Photographie en France: Textes et controverses, une anthologie, 1816–1871 (Paris: Macula, 1989), 45–148, here: 48.

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of more than 30,000 photographers and owns stock totalling over 100 million images, which are distributed via the company’s website with the help of sales offices in numerous countries worldwide.45 As we have seen throughout this study, the policy of acquisition and merger of collections is a common practice in the history of photography agencies and commercial archives; holding as many pictures as possible is the principle of and the catalyst for the picture market. However, with the emergence of digital images and the creation of a new industry, the picture market was radically transformed. For example, in 1996, the hitherto protagonist in the picture market, The Image Bank, considered the distribution of digital images insignificant, estimating it at 5% of total market transactions; 46 two years later, the company was taken over by Getty Images. Owing to their substantial investments, Corbis and Getty Images absorbed a variety of collections and companies that represented the majority of the pre-digital market environment.47 As a consequence, photographic collections of unparalleled scale emerged.

45 See Corbis corporate fact sheet, updated November 2009, http://www.corbis.com.

46

Rapaport, “In His Image,” see note 21, Part III.

47 In the early 1990s, the picture market consisted of a variety of smaller agencies that specialized in specific areas; these included photojournalistic news agencies as well as stock photography agencies. Anticipating the radical transformation in the field of communications, Corbis and Getty Images quickly became major players, as most established agencies had underestimated the impact of digital imaging and online distribution.

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3.   Creating a Digital Image Product In the pursuit of developing digital image products, Corbis faced two challenges: On the one hand, it had to transfer its analogue collections into digital data and incorporate different pre-digitized collections into one organisational structure. On the other hand, it had to develop and set up the electronic system for distributing its products.

In the beginning, however, marketing opportunities for digital images were virtually non-existent. Both these marketing opportunities and also the desire for digital images had to be created.

As the chronology of the acquisition and cooperation policy illustrates, Corbis initially sought to license its collection to private consumers, but soon widened its scope to include distribution of digital reproductions in print and electronic media for editorial and advertising purposes. After the original IHS idea of delivering digital reproductions to private homes had to be abandoned due to its technical infeasibility and lack of demand, Corbis turned to a different marketing tool. It produced a variety of CD-ROMs that were conceived of as virtual exhibitions, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Volvanos: Life on the Edge, and A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Dr. Barnes. In addition to the spectacle of viewing (relatively) high-quality images on computer screens for the first time,48 the concept consisted of enhancing the reproduced image by the addition of complementary features and applications. This development of multimedia products followed a general trend in the 1990s of exploring the possibilities of new media, as David Bearman describes with regard to photography: Digital conversion of printed books and photographs produces fast paper; it has some advantages in terms of storage and delivery over the original, but it fundamentally fails to use digital multimedia technologies to advantage. A photograph of a windmill is nice; a photograph that allows us to peel back the cover, see the mechanisms, run the mill and watch the way the crank is attached to power distribution systems, examine the renovation history and the ownership of the mill over time, etc., uses interactive multimedia to advantage. The first point to make about digital knowledge then is that it is functional, it should do something or be a service. If it is not, then it is digitized information from analogue sources, and it won’t

48  For an analysis of the display methods and aesthetics of the computer screen, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Boston: MIT Press, 2006).

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excite or really do what we need.49 The CD-ROM that perhaps came closest to embodying this idea was Leonardo da Vinci, which was based on the inventor’s scientific writings assembled in the Codex Leicester, bought by Gates at auction in 1994. Corbis promoted this product by highlighting the quality and comprehensiveness of the reproduced documents and drawings, which were enhanced by the so-called Codascope, a movable viewing frame and translation tool. Especially in the early years, Corbis strongly emphasized the educational dimension of its products: “Interactive exhibits allow users to experiment with the concepts and ideas behind [da Vinci’s] theories on astronomy, geology and the movement of water, [they] can imagine themselves alongside Leonardo as he made discoveries and developed his theories.”50 In addition, by licensing a selection of images displayed in the CD-ROM, “students, teachers and surfers” were encouraged to “create their own documentaries by doing moulded searches.”51 This description suggests that in the beginning Corbis had only a vague idea of the potential users of and uses for digital images. Despite the company’s efforts, the sales figures for the CD-ROMs were hardly satisfying and bore no relation to the production costs.52 As later developments revealed, Corbis was fundamentally mistaken in viewing CD-ROM technology “as an expedient training for the ultimate transition to online.”53

Analogue-digital transfer Having in its early years heavily invested in the purchase of content with an eye toward professional clients, starting in 1996 Corbis engaged in a vast editing and digitization project; this process is still being carried out to this day, although on a different scale. Operating with what was then the largest concentration of high-quality scanners (such as the Heidelberg Topaz and Creo Scitex, costing approximately US$500,000 each), the digitization of previously purchased collections operated at full stretch. Soon,

49 David Bearman, “Investing in Digital Knowledge,” Archives & Museums Informatics 9, no. 4 (1995): 379– 380, here: 379.

50 See promotional text for the Codascope on the back cover of the Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM, published in 1996.

51 Rapaport, “In His Image.”

52 Gant, International Directory. The article indicates that of the more than 5,000 titles produced annually

by Corbis, only four percent turned a profit. Again, there is no further evidence to support these estimates.

53 Rapaport, “In His Image.”

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several hundred thousand scans were at Corbis’ disposal; the company was scanning around the clock, adding 10,000 images each month.

The conversion of a photograph such as the 1940 picture “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island” by the American photographer Weegee (Figure 58) into digital form (Figure 59) and its development into a digital product requires multiple steps. First, the analogue material is thoroughly examined, with duplicates identified. Information related to the photograph (i.e., caption, photographer, copyright) is verified, researched, and corrected when necessary in order to render the image exploitable. As in most private or institutional digitization projects, the digitization of the analogue form and the transfer from one visualization and storage medium to another can prompt a major reassessment and re-evaluation of a collection, eliciting such questions as: In what material condition is the negative or print? Is the negative the original, or is it a copy? Does the collection contain vintage prints? Who owns the image? What exactly does the photograph show or document? Is the material interesting to today’s viewers? Is it historically valuable? Will it generate profit? In the case of Corbis, this evaluation process also involved the attribution of the photographer’s name, a step that had previously been irrelevant for the marketing of an image. As a result, an image such as “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island” was not simply an illustration of a massive crowd of people on the beach at Coney Island, but was promoted as a masterpiece by the acclaimed photographer Weegee. Another example is the previously ‘authorless’ photograph from the Bettmann Archive, “Advertising in Window of Midwestern Small Town Portrait Studio, 1932,” prominently featured in the Bettmann Portable Archive (Figure 50). Following re-evaluation of the material, the image was completely re-captioned as “Photographer’s studio window. Portraits adorn the window of a penny photographer’s studio. Birmingham. Alabama, March 1936” by Walker Evans – the information was extended and corrected and now included the photographer’s name.54 In accordance with the ideas of Douglas Crimp, who had described the process of reclassification at the New York Public Library some thirty years earlier, a new category was added to the set of accompanying information for the Bettmann collection: the “artist” who

54 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds the Walker Evans archive and is the institutional warden of Evans’ work. The archive includes a gelatin silver print of the black and white photograph “Photographer’s studio window;” however, this print carries a different name and date (“Penny Picture Display, Savannah. Photographer’s Studio Window with Portraits, 1936.”). It remains unclear whether it was the photographer himself who provided the museum’s caption, i.e., if it is the ‘correct’ description.

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took the photograph.55 While this a posteriori attribution of the photographer’s name contributes to the further alienation of the photograph from its original production and agency context and the construction of what John Szarkowski coined “photography itself,” it also enhances the commercial value of the image and adds a sense of quality to the collection as a whole.

Figure 58: Bettmann Archive, Item 566420BACME, Weegee masterprint, “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.”

Photographic print ca. 1940.

55 Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Crimp describes the implications of the reclassification of photographs in books using the example of the archival process at the New York Public Library, which ultimately led to the formation of the library’s Photographic Collections Documentation Project in the early 1980s; today, this project forms a part of the library’s Department of Photographs and Prints.

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Figure 59: Corbis website, Display of scanned image “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.” Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

In a second step, the Corbis editors select photographs for the digital reproduction according to their relevance, their re-use and sales potential, and the physical condition of the analogue negatives and prints. A photograph is then digitized as a high-quality scan of approximately 60MB, which serves as the raw, uncropped version. This master file is considered the ‘original’ digital file. The actual visual products are modified and resized versions of this raw scan. Formatted in various dimensions, they are available as low-resolution images for ‘Web & Mobile’ and as small, medium, and large images (Figure 60). The image resolution thus affects the intended end products and their potential uses. One digital image is offered as several products, each differently priced.

Consequently, the commercial value of a digital image product is not only defined by the scope of its distribution (such as the number of print-runs or regional, national, or international coverage) but also by its resolution and format. The latter could be characterized as the ‘scalability’ of the digital image, as André Gunthert proposed.56 It is important to note that the analogue carrier is not discarded; rather, it remains in the collection and is marked with a barcode by which the complete set of original and added metadata becomes machine-readable. The analogue negative or print serves as a guarantee in a double sense: On the one hand, it is considered the source, and can be re-scanned if the digital data is damaged or if future quality standards require it. On the other hand, in most cases the analogue photograph functions as the essential rights certificate, stamped or marked on the reverse side of the print or envelope.57

56 André Gunthert, “L’échelle de l’information,” L’Atélier des icônes, http:// culturevisuelle.org/icones/568.

57 See also Chapter II.2.1 for a more detailed discussion on provenance and the importance of annotations and stamps on the back of photographs, envelopes, sleeves, folders, etc.

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Figure 60: Corbis website, Available formats for “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.” Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Figure 61: Corbis website, Indexing “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.”

Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Following digitization and formatting, all available text information is incorporated into the electronic file, including the caption, the provenance, and the available sizes, along with the copyright. The attribution of categories and the detailed indexing of the image are accomplished by the editor and the indexing department (Figure 61). Finally, the digital image products are displayed in the virtual picture store and in the gigantic searchable shop window, the Corbis website (Figure 62). Thus, reflecting the methods of the traditional picture market, the creation of a digital image product is embedded within a detailed production process built upon the ideas of economic efficiency and the division of labour.

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Figure 62: Corbis website, Portal, “24/7, 365.” Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

As the design of the Corbis website in 2010 suggests, the electronic display on the screen has led to an unprecedented virtual availability of a selection of the company’s stock in the form of standardized, medium-sized, watermarked screen pictures. With its search mechanism employing both keywords and cross-referencing, the electronic database realizes what Otto Bettmann had envisioned with his card index, as described in the Bettmann Portable Archive of 1966: a mobile catalogue.

Ideally, picture retrieval should work in the following manner (and perhaps one day it will): The picture user in search of ‘Melba eating Melba toast’ will teletype his coded request to an electronic picture research pool.

After a few minutes’ wait, a Western Union messenger will arrive with a fat envelope containing pictures of Melba eating Melba toast, dry, buttered or with marmalade! Only a digit here and there has to be changed should the request happen to be for ‘Thomas Jefferson eating spaghetti’ or a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa … This Pictorial Futurama is not offered facetiously. We are getting there … To help in such pursuits and to speed up the retrieval of pictures – the right pictures – the Bettmann Archive has developed a visual index.58

For the sake of clarity, at this point several consequences engendered by the digitization of analogue photographs should be noted: First, digitization promotes the reassessment and re-evaluation of accumulated material. In some cases, such a procedure has not been performed for a long time, if ever. Information relating to the materiality 58 Bettmann ed., The Bettmann Portable Archive, 81.

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of the analogue object, such as the photographic technique, quality, and size of the print are undeniably lost in the process, as they are not integrated into the digital file.59 In turn, however, editing and re-evaluation can also result in a gain in information, as missing information and information necessary for the commodification of the image is located and added to the file. Second, digitization results in the selection of and distinction between images that remain only in analogue form and images also available in digital form. Third, the digitization of a photograph is far from being an automatic, effortless procedure; rather, it is divided into several working steps and requires manual pre- and post-production. Fourth, digitization accelerates the process of searching for pictures and, in the case of commercial collections, it increases the visibility of archival holdings that had previously only been accessible to professional clients. It goes without saying that although screen images are generally accessible, their use requires the payment of a licensing fee.

Since Corbis was conceived of as an e-business, one key concern was the development of an operational website and powerful search engine in order to efficiently market and distribute the company’s digital image products. As introduced here and addressed in detail later, the development of a business platform and functioning search engine was a slow process. In addition to the technological dimension, the transition from a business relying on service and direct contact between clients and agency editors to electronic commerce based on individual search and electronic delivery produced considerable psychological resistance, especially among professionals. This resistance also resulted from the fact that this shift threatened to, and indeed did, significantly reduce the number of picture editors, thus threatening an established profession.

In 1997, Corbis launched its first website (Figure 63), which was rather limited in its options; it mainly served as an information sheet, a billboard for the company’s URL address, and a miniature picture gallery. To begin with, clients had to be instructed in and become accustomed to the procedures of searching for, selecting, and buying images. The 1997 Corbis catalogue “Speaking in visuals,” a combination of a standard agency catalogue and promotion for its online services, featured an illustrated manual explaining the picture search and retrieval in eight steps (Figure 64).

59 It is precisely these different types of information that transcend the purpose and nature of a specific collection or archive.

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Figure 63: First Corbis website, Portal. Screenshot, April 5, 1997.

Figure 64: Corbis Images, Speaking in Visuals, (doublepage), 1997: 106–107.

By using historical images as ‘funny’ black-and-white pictures, the manual conveys the notion of an easy, effortless procedure. At the time, however, only a small number of images could be browsed, searched for, and viewed online. The actual delivery was still mostly done by mailing CD-ROMs containing high-resolution images to the clients.

Another major obstacle, in addition to the rudimentary technological infrastructure,

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was the lack of a functioning watermarking system for the diffusion of the images. In 1997, Getty Images took the lead in the development of this crucial tool in cooperation with the American computer manufacturer IBM (International Business Machines).

Modelled on the IBM Digital Library, Getty created a secure watermarking system that enabled a digital image to be visually identified as belonging to a copyright holder without detracting from the image’s visual appeal.60 By the end of the 1990s, the Corbis business strategy started to show positive results.

Between 1998 and 1999, the company’s sales figures increased by 200 percent.61 This development was considered to be an indicator that the right strategy was in place and that there would be a promising market for digital images in the future.

60

Gant, International Directory.

61 Ibid. There is no further evidence to support this claim, as the company does not disclose official financial statements.

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Chapter 2 The Revenge of Materiality However, as we will see in the following chapter, things turned out quite differently.

While digital technology certainly enhanced the mobility of images and changed the way images were produced, stored, distributed, and viewed, digital imaging was far from being inexpensive and immaterial. Corbis, like many others who invested in the digitization, development, and recycling of historical collections, encountered myriad problems, mainly originating in the materiality of photography. These problems related not only to the materiality of the analogue holdings that Corbis had purchased, but also to the materiality of the digital images, an aspect that had long been neglected.

1. Iron Mountain: Preserving the Analogue matter “When we acquired the Bettmann Archive in 1995, both Bill and I immediately recognized not only its commercial potential, but even more important, our stewardship obligation.”62 In citing the company’s stewardship obligation, Steve Davis, former CEO of Corbis, points to an episode in the company’s history that generated much criticism in the media and in the form of artistic writings and artworks.63 In 1997, Corbis solicited photography conservators (namely, Grant B. Romer from George Eastman House and Henry Wilhelm, an independent consultant) to develop a preservation plan to alleviate the deterioration process of large numbers of negatives, a process that was already underway in the early 1980s. In particular, nitrate and acetate celluloid films posed serious conservational problems. Like nitrate, cellulose acetate is chemically unstable unless kept at low temperatures. Acetate negatives are prone to a slow base decay, often referred to as the “vinegar syndrome.” Recognizable through the pun62 Henry Wilhelm, with Ann C. Hartmann, Kenneth Johnston, Els Rijper and Thomas Benjamin, High-security, sub-zero cold storage for the permanent preservation of the Corbis-Bettmann Archive photography collection, Final Program and Proceedings: IS&T Archiving Conference, The Society for Imaging Science and Technology, April 20–23, San Antonio, USA, 2004: 122–127.

63 See, for example, the writings of Hal Foster, “The Archive Without Museums,” October 77, Summer 1996: 97–119; Geoffrey Batchen, “Photogenics/Fotogenik,” Camera Austria International 62–63, 1998: 5–16; Allan Sekula, “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic of Photographs),” October 102, Fall 2002: 3–34. See also the art work by Alfredo Jaar, “Lament of the Images,” (2002), installation displayed at Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002. The list of newspaper and magazine articles critical of Corbis is endless. See, in addition to the articles mentioned above, Sarah Boxer, “A Century’s Photo History Destined for Life in a Mine,” New York Times, New York, April 15, 2001.

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gent acid smell and the brittleness, buckling, and shrinkage of the negatives, vinegar syndrome affects all types and formats of acetate film, as illustrated by an example from the Corbis collection (Figure 65). The historical collections purchased by Corbis consisted predominantly of cellulose acetate and polyester film. The cellulose nitrate film in the collection, when not previously discarded, also showed obvious signs of decay, including yellowing of the support, silver mirroring of dark areas in the image, and softening of the gelatine binder (Figure 66). In addition, parts of the colour images on polyester film included in the UPI collection had begun to fade because of the unstable nature of the colour dyes, rendering these images unusable. Handwritten remarks on a colour negative from the Bettmann collection reflect this degradation: “Poor quality, no hope, no original prints, no high quality dupes on file, no options.”

(Figure 67) In addition to the photographic material itself, envelopes, negative sleeves, markers and stickers, folders, caption sheets, index cards, and registers – all indispensable sources for the exploitation and interpretation of the visual material – were also prone to deterioration.

Figure 65: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Deterioration process of cellulose acetate film, 2009.

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Figure 66: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Deterioration process of cellulose nitrate film, 2009.

 

Figure 67: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Negative evaluation of colour negative, ca. 2002.

The preservation plan submitted to Corbis in 1997 recommended the immediate and long-term cooling of the entire negative collection.64 In keeping with this plan, in 2002 Corbis transferred the Bettmann Archive and UPI files to an underground storage facil64 

Wilhelm et al., High-security, sub-zero cold storage, 2004.

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ity located in a secluded area north of Pittsburgh. A former limestone mine, the facility is owned and managed by the information protection and storage company Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain holds documents and data from approximately 2,300 clients, including government departments, private companies, libraries, museums, and media corporations.65 This includes highly sensitive documents and data from the US Patent and Trademark Office, the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, bank details, and insurance papers, as well as the complete collection of film and music recordings from Universal Pictures Company. Storage in this humidity-controlled and high-security facility offers documents and data protection from man-made and natural disasters; the company describes itself as “protecting the world’s information.”66 It functions both as a gigantic repository for original holdings and also as a service company for records management, archiving, and digitization. In the Iron Mountain facility, Corbis leases a relatively small space of approximately 950 square metres. This space is divided into an office area in the front, including a scanning facility and housing for the card catalogues from the Bettmann Archive, ACME, INP, UPI, and the Gendreau Collection (Figure 68). The glass and film negatives and prints, as well as additional material from the Bettmann Archive, including logbooks and notebooks, numerous original copies of the Illustrated London News and Harper’s Weekly, and Bettmann Archive memorabilia are stored in a separate temperature- and humidity-controlled vault (Figure 69). The vault, which holds roughly 13 million items, is kept at about 7º Celsius and an average humidity of 35%. For a selection of approximately 28,000 ‘icons of photography’67 – a set of vintage negatives of bestselling and best-known pictures, internally referred to as VIP (Very Important Pictures) – the preservation plan recommends storage at -20º Celsius, thereby freezing the negatives. The initial plan provided for a temperature of -20º Celsius for the entire collection of 13 million items.68 However, due to the considerable costs of cooling down the vault and the need for archivists to work

65 See the website of the Iron Mountain Corporation, http://www.ironmountain.com. The mine has been in service as a long-term storage facility since the early 1950s, even before Iron Mountain purchased it; it was previously run by the private company National Underground Storage Incorporated. See “Photo Archives Heads Underground,” New York Times, April 15, 2001, accessible through the website of Wilhelm Imaging Research, http://www.wilhelm-research.com/corbis_subzero.html.

66 This refers to an advertising slogan used by the Iron Mountain Corporation in 2010. The company is active in more than 40 countries. However, the site in Pennsylvania is its only high-security preservation facility.

67 Gary Hayes, “Under Iron Mountain: Corbis stores ‘Very Important Photographs’ at zero degrees Fahrenheit,” NPPA (National Press Photographer’s Association), http://www.nppa.org/news_news_and_events/2005/01/ corbis_cave.html.

68

Wilhelm et al., High-security, sub-zero cold storage, 2004.

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with and handle the prints on an everyday basis, this plan was later abandoned.69 The low temperature and controlled humidity greatly decelerates the deterioration process and thus extends the predicted storage period of the photographic objects to several hundred years.70 In addition to this professional storage, Corbis archivists have engaged in a massive reorganization of the archival holdings, including repackaging negatives and prints into protective sleeves, wrapping glass negatives, and scanning index cards and registers. The company does not provide detailed information about the maintenance costs for its preservation facility; however, one of the archivists has stated that in 2010 the costs for the maintenance of the collection and space rental at Iron Mountain equalled the profit made from the distribution of the historical collections.71

Figure 68: Office and catalogue space at Iron Mountain Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Boyers, Pennsylvania.

Photograph, 2009.

69 The preservation plan for the Bettmann Archive and UPI also served as a model for the long-term preservation project for the Sygma collection, the so-called Sygma Initiative. Since 2009, the analogue holdings of the former news picture agency have been preserved at a storage facility located in Garnay, about 75 km west of Paris.

70 Wilhelm et al., High-security, sub-zero cold storage, 2004.

71 Unauthorized interview conducted by the author with a Corbis archivist at Iron Mountain, April 11, 2010.

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Figure 69: Storage vault at Iron Mountain Corbis Film Preservation Facility.

Photograph, 2009.

Corbis’ facility at Iron Mountain is a radical example of the consequences of digitization that also apply to most other archives and collections, both commercial and institutional: digitization does not replace analogue holdings, but rather forms parallel archives. The digital archive is not a replica but rather a ‘trace’ of the physical archive.

It establishes its own archival paradigm by distinguishing between a digital master file and various compressed versions, between the original and the copy. Thus, Corbis both preserves the analogue holdings (such as the Bettmann Archive, UPI, and Sygma collections) and maintains a digital archive. In the case of Corbis, which transferred its analogue holdings to Iron Mountain in rural Pennsylvania, digitization has resulted in a geographic divide between the conservation and archiving of photographs and the circulation and distribution of their digital surrogates. The latter is accomplished via the company’s website and with the assistance of sales representatives and picture researchers at one of the Corbis offices, as seen in a picture taken at the New York office in 1996 (Figure 70). However, the artefact does not become obsolete following digitiza-

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tion. Quite the contrary: information related to the photographic object, in particular the copyright indication and its initial context and use, is crucial for the image’s very existence in digital form and is a precondition for building a product from digital data.

As Kenneth Johnston, the director of the historical collections at Corbis sees it, “digitization is not preservation, but rather a safety back-up.”72

Figure 70: Michael Cullen, “Corbis office, New York.”

Photograph, 1996.

72 Interview conducted by the author with Kenneth Johnston on March 25, 2009, at the Corbis New York office. Like the head office of Microsoft Corporation, the Corbis headquarter is located in Seattle, Washington.

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2. Digital Materiality In contrast to the materiality of the analogue carriers, the materiality of digital images is distributed across many more levels in a more scattered form, and is therefore more difficult to identify and to interpret. It is only in recent years that the myth of the immateriality of digital imaging and digital holdings in general has begun to unravel, catching the attention of scholars.73 As I argue in the following sections, the materiality of digital images and their undeniable dependency on analogue holdings become clear when describing the functioning of Corbis and the problems that the company has encountered in the creation of their products.

The initial objective proposed in 1996 of reproducing 40,000 photographs per month and ultimately scanning the entire collection was soon curtailed. Today, the number of pictures scanned from the Corbis historical collections (the Bettmann Archive and UPI, Underwood & Underwood, etc.) is stalled at about 250,000 items. Of these 250,000 items, only a fraction are displayed on the Corbis website, thus considerably limiting the number of circulating images. New scans are predominantly carried out upon a client’s request, thus the digitization has shifted from a large-scale project to an ondemand modus operandi. In the end, it is the client who determines which pictures are digitized and which are not.

The reasons behind this complete reversal in approach were manifold. Not only were the costs for digitization (including handling, indexation, and post-production) soaring, but additional complications arose from attempts to merge different collections and their individual classification systems. Most collections were not necessarily intended for re-use: in many cases, information was missing or erroneous, files were lost, or the copyright either could not be traced or existed under different rights regimes. Corbis, like many others, had misjudged the difficulties in migrating what was often very heterogeneous metadata into a new visual database, and had underestimated the importance of having both a well-functioning database and an effective search 73 Marlene Manoff, “The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives,” Libraries and the Academy 6, no.3 (2006): 311–325, here: 320. See also Johanna Drucker, “Intimations of Immateriality: Graphical Form, Textual Sense, and the Electronic Environment,” in Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 152–177; N. Katherine Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 263–290; Andreas Kitzmann, “The Page, the Camera and the Network. Media and the Materiality of Memory,” in Memory Work: The Theory and Practice of Memory, eds.

Andreas Kitzmann, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publ., 2005), 35–49.

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engine. By primarily concentrating on the accumulation of image content and by envisioning the photograph and the digital image merely as two-dimensional resources, the company had underestimated the time and labour needed to turn digital data into a valuable product. Economic value, however, relies not only on image content; rather, it is primarily constituted through the information attributed to and the services associated with an image. In other words, in the picture market, the value of a photograph or a digital image is composed of both the image content and the way it has been formed, interpreted, distributed, etc. – that is, the context in which it appears. These two aspects are intertwined and cannot be separated. Furthermore, the ‘materialization’ of a digital image product is not an automated process; it must be carried out individually for each image and relies on evaluation and interpretation by professionals photo editors and archivists. The materialization of a digital image is, therefore, the precondition not only for the image’s commercial exploitation but also for its very existence.

To understand this initial misconception, it is helpful to examine how a digital image appears on the computer screen and how it is experienced, which inevitably connects to the idea of immateriality outlined in Chapter III.1. As scholars have argued, digitization and the digital image displayed on the screen reemphasize the illusion of transparency, prioritizing once more the perception of the image content rather than its context.74 Digital imaging accentuates an aspect of photography that is certainly an important characteristic of the medium, but one that may have prevented us from understanding the multiple functions of the medium: that is, its quality as a depictive device and as a means of creating multiple reproductions. The seemingly effortless reproducibility of digital images and the ease with which digital information can be copied, altered, and combined has prompted comparisons of digital imaging to reproductive cloning.75 This concept may well be purposefully invoked by the opening page of the Corbis website from 2002, ultimately pointing to the company’s understanding of the medium (Figure 71). The microphotography of spermatozoa zipping in various directions, accompanied by the heading “The possibilities are endless,” promotes the notion of digital imaging as a quasi-natural resource, endlessly reproducible and endlessly combinable.

74 Manoff, “The Materiality of Digital Collections,” 320.

75 Geoffrey Batchen, “Photogenics/Fotogenik,” 1998. The idea of identical reproduction or the cloning of images that arose in the mid-1990s is indeed interesting, as it tied into a much larger political and cultural debate of the time – namely, the debate over the cloning of mammals (and the potential cloning of humans), which reached its peak with the birth of the cloned sheep “Dolly” in July 1996.

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Figure 71: Corbis website, Portal, “The possibilities are endless.” Screenshot, November 10, 2002.

The relationship between image content and the way in which it is formed, interpreted, and distributed becomes apparent in examination of the display of an individual image on the Corbis website, such as the previously discussed “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island” (Figure 59). The digitized photograph takes up approximately half of the screen surface and appears in combination with all sorts of information listed as “Image details.” It is accompanied by an indication of the image category (archival), the historical collection the image belongs to (Bettmann), a condensed and more detailed original caption, and the digital archive number. The location (Brooklyn, New York, USA) and the photographer (Weegee) are hyperlinked, corresponding to the image classification and the searchable keywords. Special emphasis is placed on the copyright, both in the form of the digital watermark inserted into the image and in the information concerning the model and property release. The image, situated on the right-hand side, is framed by a dark grey background, evoking (although in inversion) the viewing mode of a light table supported by the luminosity of the computer screen.

In addition, the configuration of the screen design, combining both image and text, is reminiscent of the design of the accession cards used in library or museum collections.

The various information accompanying the image and its prominent display point out an essential, but oddly ignored aspect: one does not search for an image, but rather for the text associated with the image. Reflecting the archival structure, image query tools have always been (and still are) largely text-based. Hence, an individual image like

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“Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island” is visualized and materializes through the textual information associated with it. The image echoes the information attributed to the image, as deduced from the analogue object, and its layers of interpretation.

As the example of Corbis shows, the materiality of digital imaging manifests itself in the visible and invisible metadata attributed to the images, the copyright, and the software and hardware required for their archiving and distribution. The characterization of photography as a “multilayered laminated object,” as suggested by Sassoon and others, could therefore also be applied to digital imaging.76 In particular, it has been the merging of collections and the development of digital imaging products that have brought the various layers of photographic materiality to light. Although digital imaging may be perceived as flat or ephemeral, it produces matter that is indeed material when one considers the substantial investment needed for the development of digital imaging products and the maintenance of collections, as well as the efforts put into conservation of the digital data. It also becomes evident that a digital image does not have a value in itself, but that it needs to be materialized to become valuable. This “exchange value”77 and the conversion of an image into a “visual currency”78 depend upon the development of demand and of market structures; however, creating these structures has proven to be arduous, complicated, and time-consuming.

As is true for digital holdings in general, the materiality of digital images is further represented by the support structures required for the archiving, display, and distribution of the products. As Manoff, among others, has argued, “we access electronic texts and data with machines made of metal, plastic, and polymer. Networks composed of fiber optic cables, wires, switches, routers, and hubs enable us to acquire and make available our electronic collections.”79 The intensive energy consumption required for maintenance of the servers hosting large digital image collections has not only become a growing cost factor, but is also increasingly raising ecological concerns.

On a more abstract level, the rhetoric employed by Corbis in advertising their prod-

76 Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality,” 186.

77 Edwards et al., Photographs Objects Histories, 5.

78 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988).

79 Manoff, “The Materiality of Digital Collections,” 312.

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ucts and services may also be seen as indirectly contributing to this materialization, infusing the digital products with value. Interestingly, this rhetoric has oscillated for many years between two concepts: on the one hand, appreciation of the photograph as an object with a treasured genealogy, and on the other hand, the two-dimensional, endlessly reproducible and de-contextualized a-historical image. In its search for a functioning business model and business philosophy, Corbis has deliberately positioned itself between philanthropy and business, as evidenced by the visual and verbal rhetoric used by the company.

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3. Public access, Private Library In The Road Ahead, Gates rebuts the concerns of museums regarding the uncontrolled proliferation of digital images, claiming that “exposure to the reproductions is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for real art and encourage more people to get out to the museums and galleries.”80 This argument recalls André Malraux’s idea of the Musée Imaginaire (Museums without Walls) and the envisioned potential for photography as a medium for studying and popularizing art: “the colour reproduction does not compete with the masterpiece; it merely evokes it, and rather enlarges our knowledge than satisfy our contemplation.”81 Yet, as Douglas Rowan, the former CEO of Corbis, stresses in an interview from 1996: “This is not a ‘not-for-profit’ organization”82 – and Bill Gates is no altruist. Tellingly, the allusion to the concept of the library appears repeatedly. The reference to the Library of Alexandria, for instance, was eagerly picked up by the media during the mid-1990s, prompting predictions that “[Corbis] may swell into the world’s most comprehensive digital reserve of the imagery of mankind.”83 For the magazine Wired in 1996, “Corbis is more than the ultimate digital stock image house. It may be the first online, for-profit library.” In turn, Corbis viewed itself as “the prototype of an all-content-on-demand, public access, private library,”84 further blurring the line between public and private ambitions.

Corbis used the idea of the library as an institution dedicated to the public by turning it into a tool for its own self-promotion, and as a catalyst for digitization. However, the functioning of the company and in particular the organization of its holdings clearly controverts this idea. First, the company’s strategies are designed to benefit stakeholders and not the general public. Second, the Corbis digital archive is not structured according to the metonymic principle of the library, the Nebeneinander (juxtaposition) of elements, but operates using a hierarchical system. In a library, all books (apart from the rarest) are valued and handled in the same way, and are assigned to places on the bookshelves next to all the other books; in contrast, Corbis has highlighted certain

80

Gates et al., The Road Ahead, 259.

81 Translated by Stuart Gilbert; André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire, [1965], (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 123.

[Original: “La reproduction ne rivalise pas avec le chef-d’oeuvre présent: elle l’évoque ou le suggère.”]

82 Rapaport, “In His Image,” 1996.

83 Ibid.

84

Ibid.

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images and prioritized certain collections, as will be described in later sections.

Corbis does not use this cultural vocabulary for mere marketing purposes. By making references to the Library at Alexandria and the idea of the Museum without Walls, and particularly to the idea of the liberation and promotion of works of art through digital reproduction, the company seeks to legitimize its business model. Digitization as a technological invention, one that has been strongly supported and developed by both Corbis and Getty Images, is framed within a wider cultural history of technological innovation. These efforts of legitimization emerged in the mid-1990s, a time when the commercial benefits of and sales potential for digital reproduction were still purely hypothetical, and also a time of considerable unease with regard to this new technology. This dichotomy and the appropriation of collective memories is evident in the illustration for a Newsweek article that shows a transparency (identifiable by the thin black frame) of the (then) Corbis CEO operating an old-fashioned camera directed towards us, the spectator, and posing infront of several black and white ‘iconic’ photographs (Figure 72). By this representation, Corbis explicitly seeks to position its efforts not only as part of the historical development of photographic techniques. The image also creates a clearly delineated, rather plain but reassuring visual narrative of the human and political achievements and artistic and cultural icons deeply entrenched in Western visual history. Corbis has mobilized cultural history as a marketing strategy to legitimize its policies, thereby alleviating anxieties about the consequences of the new technology. It has also mobilized cultural history to counter widespread criticism of the appropriation and control over shared visual cultural heritage exerted by Corbis and by private companies in general.

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Figure 72: Jane Wexler, “Picture This!” Douglas Rowan posing in front of photographic ‘icons.’ In Newsweek, June 26, 1996.

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4. Finding Pictures Out of a total of 100 million photographs owned or managed by Corbis, ‘only’ four million pictures are currently displayed on the website, which drastically limits the number of visible and circulating images belonging to the Corbis collections.

The question of accessibility is indeed pivotal. On the one hand, this question naturally relates to the control and the authority wielded by the archive. On the other hand, the archival systems providing access and allowing the fast retrieval of the holdings are an essential part of the economic potential of archiving. In the commercial context, an image is worthless if it cannot be found quickly; an image is non-existent if it cannot be found at all. Thus, the economic potential of archiving relies not only on the accumulation and long-term storage of holdings, but is also reflected in the various tools and methods for managing and accessing a collection. As we have already seen with the Bettmann Archive, the history of image query tools is particularly illuminating with regard to photographic agencies, image banks and visual content providers, as their business models are largely based on the pertinence and the fast retrieval of their holdings.

In the past, the service of image providers consisted of searching for and filtering a selection of pictures according to clients’ needs. Essential to this was the specific knowledge of the archivists and editors that derived from dealing with a certain collection on a daily basis. In the case of digital archives, however, it is the client who performs this task, with the help of electronic search engines. Consequently, the primary concern and the crucial problem for commercial image suppliers lies in rendering their products as accessible as possible and in facilitating the client’s navigation through this vast quantity, this visual oversupply, this plethora of digital images. As for most digital archives, the challenge for Corbis, with its digital holdings of four million objects, is displaying the abundance of its collection and the variety of images the company has to offer; however, its search engines must provide not only a relevant selection, but must find the precise image the client is seeking.

The development of editing and managing tools for these massive picture collections – namely, the development of electronic databases and efficient, user-friendly

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search engines – is not a straightforward success story, but rather one of continuous experimentation and slow progress. The frequently changing interfaces and search mechanisms implemented on the Corbis website bear witness to this process. For example, the search field for entering keywords was integrated rather late, in 1999 (Figure 73), two years after the launch of the first Corbis website, which had primarily functioned as a billboard for the company’s URL address (Figure 63). The advanced search options were featured more prominently on the portal in the design from 2002 (Figure 74) and were later developed into a multi-optional search field, as seen on the current website, combining search by keywords with search options related to the location, date, photographer, collection, availability, copyright, and formats, among other classifiers (Figure 75). To enable a variety of search scenarios, the client is given several options to access and search the collection. With its unfolding menu and the various fields and boxes provided, the present interface is reminiscent of a control board, or perhaps a mixing console. Corbis’ quest for an ever more efficient search engine indicates the difficulties in finding images, especially in light of the radical increase in digital image production; it also demonstrates that image research tools are becoming more important than ever in the accessing and use of digital image archives.

Figure 73: Corbis website, Portal. Screenshoot, November 12, 1999.

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Figure 74: Corbis website, Portal, screenshot, May 3, 2002.

Figure 75: Corbis website, Search options. Screenshot, May 3, 2010.

However, regardless of on-going improvements in search options and the revision of metadata, the Corbis database and search engine are far from perfect. Searches often generate an overly broad selection of results that lack pertinence and include repetitions (Figure 76). From the perspective of a photography historian, the search results for “weegee, coney, crowd” may be valuable; from the perspective of a commercial image provider, however, the display of eight still images on more or less the same motif is archival noise.

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Figure 76: Corbis website, Search results for “weegee, coney, crowd,.” Screenshot, May 22, 2010.

While the lack of pertinence and the repetitiveness are partly due to the sheer quantity of images corresponding to the image query, they also result from the fact that each image is conceived of and handled as an individual image within the digital archive, without consideration of whether it previously belonged to a series of photographs on one object, topic, or event. Moreover, the photographic image has, paradoxically, proven to be quite resistant to indexing and retrieval, although it has widely shaped archival practices as an efficient medium of information storage. The polysemic nature of photographs and visual representations in general often hinders unambiguous classification, especially with regard to large collections and even more so for historical photography. The layer of time, or time distance, draws our eyes to marginal details in a photograph that we may not have noticed before: the way people, streets, clothes, hairstyles, advertising, or gestures looked in the past may draw our attention, as Roland Barthes famously noted when describing the “punctum” and “studium” of photography.85 As a consequence, in recent years Corbis and other companies involved in digital information and image management have developed additional tools and methods for structuring this data overload. Since the efforts to develop a mechanism capable of recognizing image content by means of colour and form are still in progress, Corbis is structuring its vast visual corpus using image ratings. Images are assessed with regard to their sales potential and accumulated revenue, their present-day relevance, and their artistic quality; these ratings are hidden to the person accessing the digital archive. In 85 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980).

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addition to assigning labels indicating a basic category (among others, fine arts, archival, or entertainment86), editors rank images according to one of five levels; the highest rating carries the abbreviation SS, for ‘Super Showcase.’87 Image rating has become a vital tool for organizing the massive quantity of images, as it determines the order in which search results are displayed on the website.

With the creation of a rating system and other marketing tools to highlight certain collections, the digital archive functions according to a hierarchical system. This system replaces the metonymic system, the principle used in libraries, which had previously characterized analogue photographic archives. However, in an attempt to counterbalance the effects of this hierarchization (that is, the reduction of the ‘visible’ digital holdings) and in order to emphasize the depth and variety of the Corbis collections, the search engine mixes different picture categories (documentary, archival, current events, entertainment, etc.) and includes lower-rated images along with ‘picture gems.’

Reflecting the industry’s current developments, Corbis is also actively engaged in the widespread profiling of its customers and the analysis of their search behaviours.

In accessing the Corbis website and making an image inquiry, and especially by registering on the site, a researcher or client leaves numerous traces behind, also referred to as the ‘digital footprint.’ These traces are analyzed to keep track of the client, but more importantly also to automatically anticipate potential requests, personal taste, and consumer attitude. While it can be argued that profiling enhances navigation, the process also seriously challenges the paradigm of the archive. Instead of providing more or less unbiased and universally valid search results, results are shaped according to the individual client. The resulting visualization of images is the sum of one’s previous inquiries and search behaviours. This also means that, to some extent, the client is mirroring him- or herself in each image or piece of information requested. As part of this individualization of results for an archival request, the displayed selection is additionally moulded based on the client’s specific location; e.g., accessing the Cor-

86 Corbis distinguishes between two major categories, namely “creative” and “editorial.” There are two subcategories for “creative” pictures (Rights Managed and Royalty Free) and five subcategories for “editorial:” documentary, fine arts, archival, current events, and entertainment. See also Frosh, The Image Factory, 2003; Bruhn, Bildwirtschaft. 2003.

87 The different levels are SS (Super-Showcase), S (Showcase), B, C, and D; most pictures belong to the first three categories. This information was supplied by Sébastien Dupuy, the former head of the Sygma Initiative at Corbis.

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bis website from the United Kingdom rather than France influences the search process and its results. Corbis’ electronic databases and search engines, like many across the Internet, are in the process of development from simple text-based documentation to a multilayered mechanism of visible and invisible information and metadata, and of predetermined choices and decisions. It could be argued that the advantages of this development, which has led to an unprecedented virtual availability of images in the form of cross-referenced, standardized, and watermarked screen pictures, have been negated by the individualization and customization of search results. While archives have always been marked by predetermined choices and decisions, it is this absolute lack of transparency of how an image is shaped and displayed through metadata and algorithms that creates a divide between what a photographic archive was in the past, how its content was read and re-activated, and the ways we will interact with and make use of images in the future.

In consequence, Corbis, like every commercial archive in the digital age, exerts control over its collection in two ways. First, it controls access to its analogue collection by deciding what will be digitized and what will remain only in analogue form.

In this respect, digitization may be regarded “as an insidiously repressing technology, enabling institutional control over what is made accessible.”88 With this in mind, it was the transfer of the analogue holdings to the remote preservation facility at Iron Mountain that was especially widely condemned as an imperious cultural act. Reasons for this become particularly obvious when comparing Iron Mountain, a private endeavour “protecting the world’s information,” with the high-security, long-term storage facility and former silver mine Oberried in Germany, also known as the Barbarastollen (Barbara Tunnel). In an attempt to create a time capsule for preserving the nation’s cultural heritage, the German government has been storing a variety of defining manuscripts, documents, artefacts, and artworks on microfilm in this former mine since 1975.89 While the methods used by the two projects are similar, it is important to distinguish between a governmental action to protect public treasures and a for-profit corporation’s decisions to benefit its stakeholders. At the same time, this comparison inevitably

88

Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality,” 187.

89 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C.H. Beck, 2006); first published in 1999. See also Stephan Krass, “Alexandria – London und zurück. Via Oberried, Bukarest, Paris. Kleine Exkursion für Bibliothekare, Brandstifter und Bunkerspezialisten,” Kunstforum International 127 (1994): 126–133, here: 127–128.

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leads to the highy complex question of cultural heritage and ownership. The business model of Iron Mountain is far more than mere information management; in the words of Aleida Assmann, it is an immortalization industry (Verweigungsindustrie).90 In the case of Corbis’ historical collection or the Universal film archive, with the preservation of photographs and film this notion of immortalization in a high-security, sub-zero storage facility creates a noteworthy tautology: photography freezes the moment and is frozen in time.

Given the geographical location, this transfer has theoretically limited access to the analogue holdings and limited the availability of visible pictures to those selected for digitization. An idiosyncratic search, vital to any scientific examination of the collection, is thus considerably constrained. Finding a picture at random or because it is classified in the same category as another, or finding a picture that one does not expect becomes virtually impossible. Moreover, the disproportionate ratio between digitized and non-digitized holdings is unlikely to improve, since like many others, Corbis has shifted from systematic digitization to more carefully selected projects, such as the digitization of card catalogues and reverse sides of photographs, as well as digitization on demand.

Corbis’ second method of control is wielded through the search engine. Current developments have demonstrated that control over a collection is exercised not only by controlling the digital technology, but also by how the collection is rendered accessible through the programming of a search engine – “a power that has equal potential to be democratizing and passive, or repressive and active.”91 Thus, the question of the “ownership of the printing press” that determined “the politics of the use and the access to the images”92 has shifted towards the technology used for searching and finding images.

90

Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 350.

91 Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality,” 187.

92 Ibid.

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5. The In/Discipline of the Archive and Conclusion With the exception of the nucleus collection of the Bettmann Archive, the historical collections acquired by Corbis were not created with their long-term preservation in mind, which undoubtedly contributed to the difficulties Corbis encountered in the development of its products. However, through the consolidation, editing, digitization, and particularly the preservation at Iron Mountain, the Corbis historical collection, although it is clearly intended as a commercial endeavour, resembles an archive and performs like one, especially when taking into account the three defining features shared by all archives proposed by Aleida Assmann: conservation, selection, and access.93 The effort expended and difficulties encountered by Corbis in establishing a commercial archive and turning it into a profitable business exemplifies what scholarship has characterized as the “in/discipline of the archive.”94 The assignment of an archival number, keywords, categories, and groups and the attribution of a specific storage place for analogue material (a folder, box, or shelf, or a programmed databank for digital images) conveys the idea of the archive as a fixed, disciplined structure, an orderly place – and it certainly is; otherwise, it would be useless. However, what becomes evident from the history of Corbis and the Bettmann Archive (like most archives or collections) is also the fragile character of the archive: its indiscipline. This fragility varies in degree, and it tends to be hidden by the overarching concept of the archive as a robust, authoritative body.95 This indiscipline reveals itself first of all in the materiality of the analogue and the digital forms and the idea that a photograph cannot be imagined without taking into account its performance within the archive. Information gets lost, photographs and digital data deteriorate, images cannot be found or exist in several quasi-identical copies, etc. The Corbis collection, for example, contains considerable amounts of so-called orphaned works. These are historical photographs that cannot be exploited commercially either because the copyright remains unresolved or unidentifiable, or because 93 Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 345.

94

Gillian Rose, “Practising Photography,” 567.

95 See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Hal Foster, “The Archive Without Museums,” 1996.

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it is simply impossible to tell what the photograph depicts and where, when, or why it was taken. Thus, regardless of their form, the photographic archive contains considerable numbers of static, non-circulating images; this is particularly counterproductive in the case of commercial enterprises, as these turn into visual waste.

Second, it is the aforementioned polysemic nature and the different time layers of photography that produce the fragile character of photography as an archival object. As generally acknowledged, the translation of a photograph (or an image) into text is by definition impossible, given the contrasting natures of visual and textual information, of image and text. The description of an image through keywords and its caption is thus limited by ‘aboutness.’

Third, an archival system is and will always be predicated on the manual efforts of the archivists and editors and, by extension, their know-how and rigor. In the case of Corbis, however, the disembodiment of the archive – the geographic divide between Iron Mountain, Corbis headquarters, and the sales offices – inevitably has a negative impact on the skills that stem from daily interactions and responsibilities connected with the handling of a photographic collection. If, for example, the indexing of a digitized photograph is not conducted by the editor who selected the image but instead by a separate indexing department, inaccuracy and the loss of information may be the result.96 The in/discipline – that is, the discrepancy between the notion of a quasi-automated, ideal (and idealized) archive and the actual practice of the archive – is undoubtedly amplified by digitization and the accumulation of not only vast but excessive amounts of images. As has been pointed out earlier with regard to the Bettmann collection, this follows a simple logic. With masses of pictures added to the collection and the integration of foreign collections, the archival system becomes susceptible to errors and heterogeneity. The consequence is an eclectic compilation of collections. Lacking institutional authority, the Corbis digital archive has no epistemic value per se. Through the abundance of styles, themes, and categories (Figure 77) and the increasing individualization of search results, it becomes merely a serendipitous juxtaposition of images, an archive of ‘everything’ that is potentially marketable and that has been sold in the past, 96 Many thanks to Sébastien Dupuy for pointing this out to me.

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reflecting and nourishing the notion of taste in consumer culture. The sheer impossibility of setting boundaries and creating a narrative impairs the essential function and purpose of an archive, that of ‘making sense.’ That being said, the Corbis endeavour informs us about how the reproducibility of photography repeatedly activates the fantasy of the archive; about the ways by which photographs and digital images are transformed into commodities; about the economic potential for reproducing and archiving; and about the ambiguity of photography as an object and as a medium of the archive.

Figure 77: Corbis website, Display of “Standard Archival Collection.” Screenshot, January 28, 2008.

Today, references to a ‘digital Alexandria’ have been dropped from Corbis’ business rhetoric. One reason for this may be that visual content providers face tough competition from a new generation of digital image archives, such as Flickr, Google Images, Facebook, and YouTube. For instance, in less than five years, the picture sharing website Flickr has accumulated more than four billion digital images provided by and exchanged among its users.97 Many professional photographers and public institutions use Flickr for promoting their collections, and since 2008 Flickr has been working in cooperation with Getty Images in the area of image licensing. However, as Flickr’s 97 See Flickr’s website [http://www.flickr.com].

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example shows, without archival authority (in the form of consistent classification and indexing), the problem of finding a specific image has become even more complex.98 With this in mind, in addition to the fragility of the archive, it is paradoxically the fluidity of photographic reproductions and the mobility and mobilization of images that increasingly challenge the commodification of images. While it has been argued thus far that reproducibility is the basis of and condition for the development of a business model built on the licensing of images, this very process is also clearly inflicting harm on photographic agencies, commercial picture libraries, and visual content providers. It is especially with digitization and digital imaging that this paradox arises.

Corbis holds the licensing rights for the digital version of the iconic photograph known as “Migrant Mother” taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, which was created in the context of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) initiative in 1936. Corbis displays two different versions of Lange’s photograph on its website, as well as several other images, either part of Lange’s reportage or images tagged with the keywords “migrant” or “mother.” The first version of “Migrant Mother,” a sharp and finely nuanced high-quality reproduction is distributed under the “Premium Rights Managed” rights scheme (Figure 78). The text information on the left-hand side lists the caption and the copyright holder (Corbis) and indicates that the image belongs to the Corbis Historical Premium collection. The photographer’s name is highlighted in two places: in the short title “Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange” and as a hyperlinked name. The second version, which originates from the Bettmann collection and which is available as “Standard Rights Managed,” bears the same title and a slightly different caption. The image itself, however, appears quite different. It is visibly less detailed, grainier, and features greater contrast, creating high-pitched black and white areas (Figure 79). Getty Images also distributes a copy of “Migrant Mother,” which is not surprising given the fact that many photographic agencies used to share the same material (Figure 80). The quality of the Getty Images copy seems even lower than the Bettmann copy. It is slightly blurry and in even higher contrast. In addition, the text information, such as the title (“Migrant Mother”) and the caption, is shortened. Copies of “Migrant Mother” are also owned by at least three other institutions, namely the Brit98 It is certainly questionable whether the concept of the archive applies with regard to the participatory websites mentioned in this paragraph. See André Gunthert, “L’image partagée,” Études Photographiques 24 (2009), [http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index2832.html]

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ish National Media Museum (Figure 81), the George Eastman House (Figure 82), and the Library of Congress (Figure 83), all viewable through the non-commercial website Flickr. The copy from the Library of Congress suggests that we are dealing with the ‘original.’ As indicated by the thin black frame surrounding the picture, the digitized photographic print remains uncropped. Compared side-by-side with the high-quality scan from Corbis, the Library of Congress image appears clearer and the depth of focus is greater. Moreover, the text information presents not only a different title, but also provides technical information and details about the context of the image. We learn that the woman was a 32-year-old destitute pea picker from Nipoma, California, and the mother of seven children. The photograph was taken by “Lange, Dorothea, photographer” in February or March 1936. The Library of Congress owns one negative, a nitrate negative in 4 x 5 inch format. In addition, the notes provide an extended caption and technical facts on the digitization, including the information that the negative was retouched shortly after its creation.

What becomes clear from this comparison is that although there are qualitative differences between analogue and digital reproductions, the more significant differences lie in the text information that shapes the image content. It is this text information that exemplifies the very purpose (e.g. documentary, commercial, art historical) of the archive and its conservational approach. The nature of photography and of digital imagery in particular may be considered fungible, yet, the care, knowledge, and the surrounding context provided by the archivist determine how an image will be interpreted and used. To this day, the photographic archive remains, in the words of Christopher Pinney, a “vast linguistic grid enmeshing otherwise volatile images,”99 rather than the visual grid that the arrangement of search results on the Corbis website may suggest (Figure 77).

99 Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1992), 74–95, here: 90.

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Figure 78: Corbis, item IH081187, “Migrant Mother

by Dorothea Lange, Premium Rights Managed.” Screenshot, August 22, 2009, (upper left).

Figure 79: Corbis, item BE064808, Standard Rights Managed, “Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange.” Screenshot, August 22, 2009, (upper centre).

Figure 80: Getty Images, item 2665346, “Migrant Mother.”

Screenshot, August 22, 2009, (upper right).

Figure 81: British National Media Museum “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.”

Screenshot, August 24, 2009, (bottom left).

Figure 82: George Eastman House, item 1973:0095:0001, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.” Screenshot, August 24, 2009, (bottom centre).

Figure 83: Library of Congress, “Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California, LOC.” Screenshot, August 24, 2009, (bottom right).

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Conclusion In the first part of this study, I have attempted to argue that a particular constellation of technological, economic, cultural and political factors was decisive for the expansion and the maturing of the German picture market during the Weimar Republic. The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of a plethora of new agencies and image banks and the growth of existing companies, both in Germany and at the international level. None of the analyzed factors were truly new, but rather the result of a continuous process spanning several decades. However, the convergence and culmination of technological advances, the radical expansion of markets, such as the Illustrierte and the advertising industry, the appeal of photography as a modern visual language, and the state of photographic copyright unleashed what I have termed a moment of emergence.

This moment of emergence gave rise to an upturn in photography as a visual medium, a social and cultural practice, and not least a business.

Each of these factors had ramifications for the others. The advances in camera and printing techniques and the improvement of film quality enhanced the mobility of photographers and lowered the production and printing costs, which, in turn, affected the production and diversity of photographic representation. Illustrated magazines, financed to a considerable degree through advertising, appeared in unprecedented numbers. The expansion of distribution channels multiplied the possibilities of selling images. Especially, the growing market of photographic advertisements played a fundamental role in the development of the picture market, as they served as a vital source of income for publishers and photographers, and by extension for their agents.

Photography was omnipresent. It became a medium of the masses, and as such it existed and was offered en masse. In response to the fierce competition between image suppliers and the diversity of sales opportunities, photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries increasingly specialized in certain products and markets, such as news pictures or various types of Gebrauchsfotografie – utilitarian photography for editorial or advertising purposes. The production and distribution of masses of images and the quasi-interchangeability between images required efficient logistics and more sophisticated administrative and organizational methods, including the division of labour and the establishment of sustainable business relations and cooperation. It is precisely the growing importance of the logistics and the image ‘infrastructure,’ which

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must be acknowledged as indicators for the industrialization of images. The intense circulation furthermore created the pressing need to juridically regulate supply and demand between photographers, agencies, and their clients. As highlighted at several instances, the modern picture market evolved with the advent of photographic image rights that was taking shape during the first decades of the twentieth century. It is indeed alongside the establishment of copyright protection that photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries imposed themselves as unavoidable mechanism between the production and the distribution of images. As ‘agents’ they represented the interests of photographers; they negotiated image rights; they produced copies and delivered them to editorial departments, advertisers, graphic designers and artists; they administered image rights and ensured their observance; they handled the accounts and stored photographs. As ‘producers,’ or image banks they also acquired exclusive rights, purchased whole stocks of images and developed thematic collections.

Thus, the professionalization of the way photographic agencies and commercial picture libraries operated must be seen as pivotal in the acceleration of the commodification of photography and the industrialization of the picture market during the first decades of the twentieth century.

In contrast to the more general approach in Part I, the detailed study of the development and history of the Bettmann Archive carried out in Part II provided a unique case for taking up and exploring the established threads. It provided a lens for investigating the various methods of using and conceptualizing photography in the commercial context. As I have argued, the foundation of the Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin around 1933 was symptomatic for the time, place and socio-cultural environment in which it emerged. Establishing a distribution service for photographic images (and in the case of the Bettmann Archive, a picture research and distribution service for photographically reproduced historical images) promised to be uncomplicated, modern and lucrative. The dynamic of the picture market, coupled with the worsening political and economic situation, drove all sorts of newcomers (including an academic and dilettante like Otto Bettmann) to try their hand at selling photographs and photographic reproductions. What became evident throughout Part II was the strategic merging of Bettmann’s academic background and institutional experience with contemporary influences and market tendencies. It is indeed the recurring oscillation between an institutional/academic character and a commercial/pragmatic practice that determined the

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business model of the Bettmann Archive and contributed to its success. Consequently, the concept of duality has been the central theme of Part II and the starting point for studying the numerous influences and satellite topics that become surfaced through the study of the Bettmann Archive.

First, there was Otto Bettmann’s training in library studies and his professional experience as a librarian at the Kunstbibliothek. Bettmann’s idea of reproducing images with his private Leica camera was clearly inspired and made possible by the advances and uses in the field of reproduction photography in the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, the capability of reproduction photography as a copy machine for systematically reproducing documents and books was intensely discussed among libraries and museums, governmental institutions and scholars worldwide. It promised to considerably ease the exchange, circulation and storage of visual or textual information.

The potential of reproduction photography had already been confirmed decades earlier, namely since René Dragon’s first microfilm applications during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 and the siege of Paris. In the 1920s, however, the technical advances (i.e. the improvement of cameras and film material, including the use of safety film) and the strong interest by manufacturing companies such as Eastman Kodak or Leitz in microphotography for library and archival management spurred its widespread application and use. As a librarian at the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, Bettmann was well acquainted with this method. Throughout his career, he photographed the collections of various European and American libraries, which were usully equipped with reproduction apparatuses. Like in many commercial agencies, a copystand was furthermore installed in the office of the Bettmann Archive itself. The latter served for reproducing the company’s own collection of antiquarian books and prints, and for rescaling or reproducing photographs in case the original prints were inadequate or damaged. As ‘raw’ material, the library holdings and purchased image collections were for the most part of no, or little monetary value. Moreover, many of them were uncopyrighted images or part of the public domain. They represented an inexhaustible resource for the Bettmann Archive, one from which endless reproduction masters could be produced at low production costs. The investment in the accumulation of the Bettmann stock was thus reduced to a minimum. In their abundance, these collections resembled a natural resource, a resource that waited to be untapped, fashioned and exploited. The possibilities offered by microphotography for libraries and the dynamics of the contemporary

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picture market were the crucial incentives for Bettmann to develop a commercial distribution service.

What Bettmann valued in photography was its ability to store image content in a highly reduced format, and to enlarge and replicate it later on. Bettmann used reproduction photography to copy the unnoticed, forgotten, or hidden visual treasures found in various forms of publications or other sources. Released from their original form and context, these copied book illustrations and prints became autonomous, and, above all, mobile elements that could be put to new uses. Photography’s ability to free images, especially printed images from their original form and to mobilize them was an essential part of its economic potential, a potential Bettmann recognized and of which he made ample use. In this sense, the small format camera and the 35mm film represented an almost ideal technique for reproducing masses of images and reproducing them costeffectively. This method may not have corresponded to the standards prevalent among image providers during the 1930s and later. However, the Leica camera, the 35mm negative format, and the use of celluloid acetate roll film had decisive advantages in terms of mobility, storage and archiving. Photography transformed all kinds of images into standard-formatted commodities; the 35mm negatives were easily manageable; they became the vehicle of reproduction, storage and preservation. Surprisingly, the actual quality of negatives and by extension the image quality was rather of secondary concern, especially in the company’s early years.

Bettmann’s broad academic background in history and art history as well as philosophy also considerably influenced the company’s business model and its viability. The analysis of the concept of subject eyes suggested that Bettmann’s approach was inspired by phenomenology and modern iconography. However, these theoretical methods were reshaped, simplified and combined in order to serve the needs of a commercial enterprise; they functioned as devices, as techniques, for selecting, structuring and exploiting images of varying provenance, style, intention and era. As a librarian and historian, Bettmann knew unerringly where and how to find pictorial resources in libraries, museums, archives, antiquarian bookshops and private collections, but more importantly he knew exactly what to look for in images. His visual literacy enabled him to navigate an endless stream of illustrated publications and picture collections with the aim of gleaning images that could be expected to have commercial and archi-

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val potential. The selection criteria for the development of the Bettmann Archive consisted in the relevance and ‘subject-ness’ of the content of an image, its fast and easy legibility and good reproducibility. The selection procedure was not least influenced by the organizational structure, in particular the classification system, and the market expectations. The latter proved to be of major importance. Bettmann demonstrated an astute understanding of and sensibility for the specific needs (and sometimes vague ideas) of his clients. As a result, the company’s pictorial products were highly versatile. The Bettmann Archive provided both single images and picture stories; it sold illustrations and ideas for editorial and advertising content; it searched for pictures and created picture narratives. Hence, the company was able to generate demand for historical illustrations for a variety of uses. In this, Bettmann’s awareness of contemporary trends and debates, such as social and political photo reportage, New Typography, American Industrial Design and 1920s and 1930s avant-garde and popular culture undoubtedly contributed to his distinct ability to anticipate and suggest modern uses for historical images.

The precondition, albeit not exclusively, for the re-use and re-cycling of images was their a-historical treatment, their de-contextualisation and the negation of the function of an image as a discrete entity. Departing from phenomenological and iconographical methods of picture analysis and interpretation, the radical reduction of images to the objects and ideas they depicted de-contextualized the image and condensed its meaning to keywords (and text in general). The style and provenance of a picture, or its initial use were ignorable. Instead, the Bettmann Archive aimed at the creation of timeless pictures reduced to the subject or concept level. With exceptions, pictures had to be cleared of their original meaning and context in order to acquire new meanings and news contexts. Accordingly, the a-historical treatment of images was not a conceptual weakness but the qualification for the re-use or recycling of pictures through photography. It thus appeared as an irony that the Bettmann Archive defined itself as a historical picture library on the one hand, but on the other supplied pictures whose original context had been extinguished, or was of only limited relevance.

Again, in this scheme, photography functioned as an ideal medium. Not only did it standardize all kinds of images to a single negative format. Photography also obliterated the material traces, including the copyright and image provenance of the image

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sources. The material features and particularities as book illustrations, news pictures, as element of a photographic collection or of a series of images, the contextualizing information faded with the photographic reproduction of an image. As standardized objects, these images crossed the threshold to a new market: they could be used and re-used for varying purposes. In addition, the existing hierarchies between image categories, such as fine arts versus illustrations of popular culture were flattened. The reproduction provided raw material; yet, as such it was only of little value. As I have argued, the photographic reproduction needed to be shaped and transformed into a product – it needed to be commodified through the services and actions that surround the image in the commercial context: the image infrastructure.

The development of this infrastructure and the benefits (and conflicts) resulting from the dual approach became particularly evident in the chapter on the archive and retrieval system of the Bettmann Archive. The analysis of the index card, the card catalogue and classification system illustrated Bettmann’s academic approach and methodological thinking. The captioning, indexing, and classifications relied on models developed for libraries and for the documentation and management of museum collections. It was informed by the Dewey Decimal Classification and methods employed at the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, among others, operating with multiple keywords for the description and organization of art. At the same time, it was inspired by the general preoccupation during the first decades of the twentieth century with modern techniques of archiving, information management and business administration, which emphasized the primary function of image banks as managers of visual material. Bettmann’s inventive application of his bibliographical knowledge and skills and the importance attributed to the efficient retrieval of images were advanced for its time, especially in the commercial context. Bettmann aimed at using photography not only as a medium to mobilize and commodify images, but also as a tool for the organization and fast retrieval of images. In other words, it was driven by the idea of moving from an exclusively text-based to a pictorial organizational system. However, the evolution, multiple revisions and simplification of the index cards as well as the changing status of the Bettmann card catalogue also reflected the conflict that resulted from the adaptation and combination of different archival methods. The continuous experimentation and modifications not least bore witness to the incompatibility of an academic-institutional approach with a for-profit enterprise based on the principles of

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economic efficiency.

In Part III, I opened arguing that in the 1990s the anticipated economic and archival potential of digital imaging reanimated a fantasy that had infused photography from its early days on, and one that the librarian and picture man Otto Bettmann had undoubtedly shared: the idea of the immateriality of the (analogue or digital) photographic reproduction. This alleged immateriality would considerably ease the accumulation, management, storage and exploitation of ever-growing collections. This technological fantasy, or imaginary, buttressed the creation of new companies, new standards and new markets. Coming from the field of information technology, Corbis and Getty Images attempted to monopolize the market for digital imaging through their unrivalled technical and financial means. For Corbis, the acquisition of the Bettmann Archive was merely one of various collections; yet, comparing the incomparable histories of both companies revealed several significant parallels. Although different in their approach and selection process, the Bettmann Archive and Corbis first concentrated on the reproduction and licensing of museum and library collections, as they represented a pre-selection certified by the authority of the respective cultural institution. In reference to Curt Glaser’s failed attempt to commercialize the holdings of the Kunstbibliothek, I argued that Otto Bettmann was able to take advantage of the absence of sales structures within the Kunstbibliothek and other institutions as well as from the discrepancy between the existing copyright laws and their actual application.

The situation in the 1990s was quite different. The appropriation of images using the digital medium was not viable due to the moral and financial power of copyright and the increasing market-dependent nature of most cultural institutions.

Another aspect was the role and intrinsic value of a well-functioning archive and retrieval system. The development of such system was crucial for the success and the public image of the Bettmann Archive. Bettmann’s strength and superiority undoubtedly resided in his understanding of the importance of archival functionality and efficiency for the successful exploitation of images. As we have seen from the analysis of the Corbis search engine and the transition to an electronic commerce, the problem of accessibility has considerably amplified with digital imaging. It has become the primary concern of today’s image banks. In addition, the Bettmann Archive and Corbis were confronted with the consequences of the materiality of photography and the

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paradigm of the market itself: holding as many pictures as possible is the principle and the catalyst of the picture market. Yet, with masses of pictures added to a collection and the integration of foreign collections, the archival system becomes susceptible to errors and heterogeneity. This eventually increases the fragility and in/discipline of the archive with profound consequences for the meaning, visibility and circulation of images.

For both, the Bettmann Archive and Corbis (and this can be said for image banks in general), photography functioned as a medium to mobilize, standardize and commodify images. A major technical development in the tradition of photography, digital imaging ultimately emphasizes the ambiguities of photography, including its fluidity, the problematic status of the original and the copy (and by extension copyright), its dependency on text and the polysemic nature of photographs (and images in general).

Finally, one may claim that, paradoxically, it is the consequences of the industrialization of images, forged by photography agencies and commercial picture libraries throughout the twentieth century, that represent today’s greatest challenges in making photography‌ a profitable business.

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JAAR, Alfredo. Lament of the Images (2002). Video installation, photographs. Exhibited at Documenta XI. Kassel, 2002.

KRICHBAUM, Jörg. Lexikon der Fotografen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981.

Ryerson University. Black Star collection Ryerson University. (Online: http://www.imagearts. ryerson.ca/collection/), accessed on August 8, 2009.

SEARS, Minnie Earl. List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries. [1923]. 4th edition. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1944.

SNYDER, Henry Rossiter. Cash from your camera; how to make and sell photographic prints,

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with a market list. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Company, 1929.

–––––. Fifty dollars a week with car and camera; being an account of a delightful out-of-doors occupation for the photographer with his camera. New York: Rossiter Synder Publishing Company, 1936.

SORENSEN, Lee, ed. “Held, Julius.” In Dictionary of Art Historians. (Online: http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/heldj.htm), accessed on July 30, 2009.

STRAUSS, Herbert A., and Werner Röder, eds. Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, vol. 2. München: Saur, 1983: 100.

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WILLIS, Arthur G. Photography as a business. London: New York: Pitman & Sons, 1928.

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List of Illustrations Part I

Figure 1: Advertisements. In Die Dame 55, no. 21, 1928, 48.

Figure 2: Advertisements. In Die Dame 55, no. 21, 1928, 46–47.

Part II

Figure 3: Michael O’Connor, “Portrait of Otto Bettmann with Magnifying Glass,” ca. 1988. In Bettmann, Picture Man, 1992: 3.

Figure 4: Eduard Sauer, “Business Emblem, Bildarchiv Dr. Otto Bettmann, Berlin.” Photograph, ca. 1933.

Figure 5: Advertisement “We’re not so young” for Columbia Broadcasting System. In Fortune, February 17, 1938.

Figure 6: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann on Office Copy Stand.” Photograph, ca. 1940.

Figure 7: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann with Pictorial Magazine Master Files.” Photograph, ca. 1960.

Figure 8: Bettmann Archive, Item 350-19, “Thomas L. Luder’s Pedespeed, 1870.” Clipping from London Illustrated News on cardboard, ca. 1940.

Figure 9: Bettmann Archive, Reverse side of item Pg. 9469, “The Ladder. Early Photo by Fox Talbot, ca. 1843.” Photograph, ca. 1945.

Figure 10: “Photography Category.” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966: 161.

Figure 11: Bettmann Archive, Item 22DC, “Cook Buying Meat. Woodcut by Susanna von Sandrart.” Photographic print on cardboard, ca. 1935–1940, (left); Bettmann Archive, Item A VI/22, “Fleischkaufende Köchin.” Index card, cardboard, ca. 1933, (right).

Figure 12: Minnie Earl Sears, List of Subject Headings for Small Libraries, 1944: 373. Detail with handwritten annotations, ca. 1944.

Figure 13: Berenice Abbott, “Newsstand.” Photograph, 1935.

Figure 14: “Absurdities Category.” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966: 11.

Figure 15: Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle. La Vie Eléctrique, 1890. Front cover, drawn illustration.

Figure 16: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann in His Office with Magnifying Glass.” Photograph, ca. 1935–1940. In Bettmann, Picture Man, 1992: 31.

Figure 17: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann Viewing an Illustrated Book.” Photograph, ca.

1980.

Figure 18: Anne Clopet/Corbis, “Lepidomterist Jacques Pierre Doing Research.” Photograph, ca. 1990–1998.

Figure 19: Pierre Vauthey/Corbis, “Photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue Looks at Slides in His Paris Home.” Photograph, September 20, 1974.

Figure 20: Hulton-Deutsch Collection, “President Roosevelt with His Stamp Collection.” Photograph, ca. May 1936.

Figure 21: Maurice Maurel/Bettmann, Corbis, “Man Marking Diamond with India Ink.” Photograph, June 24, 1961 Figure 22: Bettmann Archive, “Bettmann as Sherlock Holmes.” Photographic, ca. 1980–1990.

Figure 23: “Speaking of Pictures … A Frenchman Foresaw Mechanized War in 1883.” In Life, June 15, 1942: 12–13.

Figure 24: “Mulberry Bend.” In Saturday Evening Post, August 2, 1958: 34–35.

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Figure 25: “She’s Still a Thriller.” In The Rotarian, May 1949: 16–19.

Figure 26: Bettmann Archive, “Otto Bettmann with Clients.” Photograph, ca. 1965.

Figure 27: Bettmann Archive, “Advertisement for Kingsbeer Brewery.” Photograph, ca. 1940.

Figure 28: “You Can’t Patent That.” In The Rotarian, September 1946: 29.

Figure 29: Toni Zepf, “Advertisement for Container Corporation of America.” Photograph, ca.

1938.

Figure 30: Bettmann Archive, “Advertisement for the Bettmann Archive.” Imprint on paper, ca.

1945.

Figure 31: Business emblem, “The Bettmann Archive, New York, ca. 1936.” In Bettmann, Picture Man, 51.

Figure 32: Bettmann Archive, Index card B. 35/23, “Werkstatt eines mittelalterlichen Schreib-

ers. Miniatur. K.K. Berlin.” Cardboard, ca. 1933.

Figure 33: Bettmann Archive, Index card B. 34/19, “Pain: Hands in painful convulsion, Detail from Grunewald, Isenheim Altar, Strassburg.” Cardboard, ca. 1936.

Figure 34: Bettmann Archive, Index card B. 34/19, “Grünewald, Händepaar vom Isenheimer Altar.” Detail of recto side, cardboard, ca. 1933.

Figure 35: Bettmann Archive, Index card 09820, “Travel equipment of a photographer around 1870. Wood engraving.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

Figure 36: Bettmann Archive, Index card 136-15, “Photography, Mr. Fenton’s Photographic Van, as used during the Crimean War.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

Figure 37: Bettmann Archive, Index card 09817, “Daumier, Honoré (1808–1879) Photography, Lithography from Nouveau Procede.” Cardboard, ca. 1940.

Figure 38: Bettmann Archive, Index card F. 8406, “Fenton, Roger / Crimean War / Photograph.”

Detail of front side, paper, ca. 1945.

Figure 39: Bettmann Archive, Item, F. 8406, “Roger Fenton’ photographic darkroom van used during the Crimean war.” Photograph, ca. 1945.

Figure 40: Alphonse Bertillon. Index card “Mr. Galton 19.4.93, no. 277.” Cardboard, ca. 1893.

Figure 41: National Museum of Film and Television, Accession card, “Lens with which the pictures of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature were taken.” Front and reverse side. In Finn, Presenting Pictures, 2004: 160.

Figure 42: Roneo Ltd., “Roneodex filing system, 1951.” In Moriarty, “A Backroom Service?”

2000: 51.

Figure 43: Bettmann Archive, “Card Catalogue in Alphabetical Order, ca. 1940.”

Figure 44: Bettmann Archive, “Logbook, ca. 1945.”

Figure 45: Bettmann Archive, Bettmann collection 35mm negative roll film, ca. 1945 (left); Bettmann collection diapositve, ca. 1950 (top right); ACME Pictures glass negative, ca. 1920 (bottom right).

Figure 46: Bettmann Archive, 35mm negative roll film in transparent sleeve, ca. 1945.

Figure 47: Bettmann Archive, Model index card C 54/7 “Mielot, Jean: Miracles de Notre Dame.”

In Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, 1939: 536–537.

Figure 48: Bettmann Archive, “One Word is Worth a Million Pictures.” Illustration by Bernard Bloom, imprint on cardboard, ca. 1955.

Figure 49: Bettmann Archive, Purchase Order Form with Extract of Index. Imprint on paper, ca. 1955.

Figure 50: “Photography Category, ‘Walker Evans’ Penny Picture Display.’” In Bettmann, Bettmann Portable Archive, 1966: 160.

Figure 51: “Girls Hats.” In Eaton Fall/Winter mail order catalogue, 1917.

Figure 52: “Wall Decoration.” Eaton Fall/Winter catalogue, 1917.

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Figure 53: “Men’s suits,” Manufrance mail order catalogue, 1931.

Part III

Figure 54: Louie Psihoyos, “The Information Revolution, 500 Monitors.” Digital Painting, 2003.

Figure 55: “Prison building at Presidio Modelo, view from the inside. Isla De la Juventud,

Cuba.” Photograph, 2005.

Figure 56: Christopher J. Morris, “Data Computer Center at Corbis, Bellevue.” Photograph,

2001.

Figure 57: Corbis website, Array of collections distributed through the Corbis website. Screen-

shot, March 25, 2009.

Figure 58: Bettmann Archive, Item 566420BACME, Weegee masterprint, “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.” Photographic print, ca. 1940.

Figure 59: Corbis website, Display of scanned image “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.” Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Figure 60: Corbis website, Available formats for “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.”

Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Figure 61: Corbis website, Indexing “Massive Crowd on Beach at Coney Island.” Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Figure 62: Corbis website, Portal. Screenshot, December 8, 2010.

Figure 63: Corbis website, Portal. Screenshot, April 5, 1997.

Figure 64: Corbis Images, Speaking in Visuals, 1997: 106–107.

Figure 65: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Deterioration process of cellulose acetate film, 2009.

Figure 66: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Deterioration process of cellulose nitrate film, 2009.

Figure 67: Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Negative evaluation of colour negative, ca. 2002.

Figure 68: Office and catalogue space at Iron Mountain Corbis Film Preservation Facility, Boyers, Pennsylvania. Photograph, 2009.

Figure 69: Storage vault at Iron Mountain Corbis Film Preservation Facility. Photograph, 2009.

Figure 70: Michael Cullen, “Corbis office New York.” Photograph, ca. 1996.

Figure 71: Corbis website, Portal “The possibilities are endless.” Screenshot, November 10, 2002.

Figure 72: Jane Wexler, “Picture this!” In Newsweek, June 26, 1996.

Figure 73: Corbis website, Portal. Screenshot, November 12, 1999.

Figure 74: Corbis website, Portal. Screenshot, May 3, 2002.

Figure 75: Corbis portal, Search options. Screenshot, May 22, 2010.

Figure 76: Corbis website, Search results for “weegee, coney, crowd.” Screenshot, May 22, 2010.

Figure 77: Corbis website, “Standard Archival Collection.” Screenshot, January 28, 2008.

Figure 78: Corbis, Item IH081187, “Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, Premium Rights Managed.” Screenshot, August 22, 2009.

Figure 79: Corbis, Item BE064808, Standard Rights Managed, “Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange.” Screenshot, August 22, 2009.

Figure 80: Getty Images, Item 2665346, “Migrant Mother.” Screenshot, August 22, 2009.

Figure 81: British National Media Museum “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.” Screenshot, August 24, 2009.

Figure 82: George Eastman House, Item 1973:0095:0001, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.” Screenshot, August 24, 2009.

Figure 83: Library of Congress, “Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children.

Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California, LOC.” Screenshot, August 24, 2009.